THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
v^O^ IPqi
THE ROD, THE ROOT, AND
THE FLOWER
THE ROD, THE ROOT
AND
THE FLOWER
BY
COVENTRY PATMORE
"There shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower
shall rise up out of his root."
" My covenant shall be in your flesh."
LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET
COVENT GARDEN
1895
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PREFACE
If St. Augustine found it necessary to publish
fourteen books of " Retractations," it is not likely
but that I have, in the following pages, erred in
some points, at least verbally ; but I am the
more likely to be exempt from considerable
error inasmuch as I make no ridiculous
pretence of invading the province of the
theologian by defining or explaining dogma.
This I am content with implicitly accepting ;
my work being mainly that of the Poet,
bent only upon discovering and reporting
how the " loving hint " of doctrine has " met
the longing guess " of the souls of those who
have so believed in the Unseen that it has
become visible, and who have thenceforward
found their existence to be no longer a sheath
without a sword, a desire without fulfilment.
78.S3.96
VI ROD, ROOT, yVND FLOWER
The Steam-hammer of that Intellect which could
be so delicately adjusted to its task as to be
capable of cither crushing a Hume or cracking
a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue
which had the weight of a hatchet and the edge
of a razor is silent ; but its mighty task of so
representing truth as to make it credible to the
modern mind, when not interested in unbelief,
has been done. I only report the cry which
certain " babes in Christ " have uttered: "Taste
and see that the Lord is sweet." And far be it
from me to pose as other than a mere reporter,
using the poetic intellect and imagination so
as in part to conceive those happy realities of
life which in many have been and are an actual
and abiding possession ; and to express them
in such manner that thousands who lead beauti-
ful and substantially Catholic lives, whether
outside or within the visible Church, may be
assisted in the only true learning, which is
to know better that which they already know.
I should be horrified if a charge of " origin-
ality " were brought against me by any person
qualified to judge whether any of the essential
matter of this book were "original" or not.
Mine is only a feeble endeavour to "dig again
PREFACE Vll
the wells which the Philistines have filled." I
am quite aware that many readers, zealously
Christian, will put aside this little volume with
a cry of " Ugh, ugh ! the horrid thing ; it's
alive ! " My book is perhaps open to this
objection, but there is no help for it.
It may also be objected that there is no
particular reason for the limits I have set my-
self in this volume. There might just as well
have been three volumes as one, or thirty as
three. I have not written more, simply because,
in some matters, a part is greater than the whole,
a little more than much ; and the thoughts which
the reader may be induced by what I have
written to think for himself, will be a hundred-
fold more valuable to him if so learned than if
they were learned from me.
A systematic Philosopher, should he conde-
scend to read the following notes, will probably
say, with a little girl of mine to whom I showed
the stars for the first time, " How untidy the
sky is ! " But who does not know that all philo-
sophies have had to pay, for the blessing of
system, by the curse of barrenness ? Sensible
people will feel shocked at my "paradoxes,"
which, however, are not mine, and are, as
vill ROD, ROOT, AND FLOWER
Coleridge says, the only mode in which realities
of a certain order can be approximately ex-
pressed. The readers from whom alone I ex-
pect a full and hearty, though silent, welcome,
are those literary persons who, I am sincerely
glad to see, find my writing, as Fuseli said of
Blake, " D d good to steal from," not
knowing the sources from which I also have
derived my matter — and make it my only
claim to be heard that I have done so.
Coventry Patmore.
Lymington, May 1895.
CONTENTS
PAGE
AuREA Dicta ...... 3
Knowledge and Science • • • • 53
Homo ........ 99
Magna Moralia 145
AUREA DICTA
AUREA DICTA
I
If you wish to influence the world for good, leave
it, forget it, and think of nothing but your own
interests.
II
" He must have very little spirit," says St.
Bernard, "who thinks that a spirit is nothing."
Ill
" God," says a great Philosopher — Proclus, if
I remember rightly — "is not infinite, but the
synthesis of Infinite and Boundary."
IV
All reasoning ends in an appeal to self-evidence. I I
AUREA DICTA
V
That which is absolutely simple, the Life, whicli
is the root or surd of all, must be literally absurd.
Let us concede this point to the scientist.
VI
If you try to simplify or pare off the superfluous
from the minds and speech of most men, you will
find that nothing is left. There is no simplicity
in them, for there is no truth ; truth and simplicity
being, as Aciuinas says, the same thing.
\TI
" He who meditates night and day upon the
law of the Lord shall yield his fruit in due season."
VIII
Heaven, Earth, Sea, and Hell witness with a
I thousand voices the secret which is the sole felicity
hC^ of man ; and almost all men refuse to hear.
AUREA DICTA
IX
" Searchers of Majesty shall be overwhelmed
with the glory." Blissfully overwhelmed ; ruined
for this world, yet even in this enriched beyond
thought ; happy searchers, consumed by the
thunder of divine instructions and the lightning
of divine perceptions, but surviving as a new
creature in the very flesh of her destroyer.
X
With unsealed eye-balls I beheld the Rod,
And in the garden walk'd again with God,
says Browning. Let him whose eyes have been
thus opened beware ; for none is ever restored to
Paradise a secotid time.
XI
When a thing manifestly z>, none but fools will
trouble themselves with difficulties as to how it can
be. And yet who is not more or less a fool ?
Who dares to believe his own eyes ?
AUREA DICTA
XII
The spirit of man is like a kite, which rises by
means of those very forces which seem to oppose
its rise ; the tie that joins it to the earth, the
opposing winds of temptation, and the weight of
earth-born affections which it carries with it into
the sky.
XIII
Lovers put out the candles and draw the
curtains, when they wish to see the god and the
goddess ; and, in the higher Communion, the
night of thought is the light of perception.
XIV
Greatly to live is such a burthen of joy that the
sharpest pain of sacrifice is a welcome easement
of it. " ConsunDiiatum est." The Cross is only
a mitigation of the consummation.
AUREA DICTA
XV
Hate pleasure, if only because this is the only
means of obtaining it. Reject the foul smoke, and
it will be forced back on you as pure flame. But
this you cannot believe, until you shall have
rejected it without thought of reward.
XVI
Great is his faith who dares believe his own
eyes.
XVII
Nature fulfilled by grace is not less natural,
but is supernaturally natural.
XVIII
The promises of the Devil are kept to the
letter and broken in the spirit ; God's promises
are commonly broken to the letter and fulfilled
past all hope to the spirit.
\
AUREA DICTA
XIX
Man, looking on that which is below him, is an
"image" of God, and knows not but that he is
Ciod ; but, looking upwards, he becomes a " like-
ness " of God, as the sheath is the likeness of the
sword.
XX
There are not two sides to any question that
really concerns a man, but only one ; and this
side only a fool can fail to see if he tries.
XXI
No writer, sacred or profane, ever uses the
words "he" or "him" of the soul. It is always
"she" or "her"; so universal is the intuitive
knowledge that the soul, with regard to God who
is her life, is feminine.
AUREA DICTA
XXII
Science is a line, art a superficies, and life, or
the knowledge of God, a solid.
XXIII
The Tree of Knowledge is become, to the
chosen, the Tree of Life ; " Under the Tree where
thy mother was debauched I have redeemed
thee."
XXIV
Rhea, the Earth, was the mother of the Gods,
and it is only by inspired knowledge of our own
nature, or earth, which is seen, that we can know
anything of the Divine, which is unseen. "The
natural first, afterwards the supernatural."
lo, AUREA DICTA
XXV
No great art, no really effective ethical teaching-
can come from any but such as know immeasure-
ably more than they will attempt to communicate.
xxvi
We often mistake our own sweet childhood for
the old time, which, had we lived in it, we should
have found almost as intolerable as our own.
The world has always been the dunghill it is now,
and it only exists to nourish, here and there, the
roots of some rare, unknown, and immortal Flower
of individual humanity.
XXVII
Do the right, and God will enable you to do it
rightl}'.
XXVI II
So give me to possess this mystery that 1 shal
not desire to understand it.
AUREA DICTA ii
XXIX
Our thoughts and feehngs are modifications
of our spiritual substance, and the soul, as a
phonograph, retains them all forever, to lie tacit
or to be summoned at need.
XXX
Ask abundantly, for the measure of your asking
shall be that of your receiving.
XXXI
" An instant of pure love is more precious to
God and the soul, and more profitable to the
Church than all other good works together,
though it may seem as if nothing were done." — Si.
John of the Cross.
12 AUREA DICTA
XXXII
God loves the soul which desires perfection, as
a Lover always does, that is as if she were already
perfect. This fact creates, when apprehended, a
far more vehement desire to become perfect than
if perfection were the price of such love in the
future.
XXXIII
" What you do not understand, with submission
wait for, and what you do understand, hold fast
with charity." — S/. Augustine.
XXXIV
" Then Tobias exhorted the Virgin and said to
her : For these three nights we are joined to
God ; and when the third night is over, we will
be in our own wedlock."
XXXV
God sets the soul long, weary, impossible
tasks, yet is satisfied by the first sincere proof
that obedience is intended, and takes the burthen
away forthwith. " Could ye not watch with me
one hour ? "
AUREA DICTA 13
XXXVI
None attains the promised land " except those
httle ones who ye said should be a prey," i.e. the
perceptions attained in and presei'ved from child-
hood and youth, which the Tempter is always
endeavouring to destroy.
XXXVI 1
To some there is revealed a sacrament greater
than that of the Real Presence, a sacrament of
the Manifest Presence, which is, and is more
than, the sum of all the sacraments.
XXXVIII
The Catholic Church alone teaches as matters
of faith those things which the thoroughly sincere
person of every sect discovers, more or less
obscurely, for himself, but does not believe, for
want of external sanction.
14 AUREA DICTA
XXXIX
If we may credit certain hints contained in the
lives of the Saints, love raises the spirit above
the sphere of reverence and worship into one of
laughter and dalliance ; a sphere in which the
Soul says :
Shall I, the gnat, which dances in Thy ray,
Dare to be reverent ?
XL
God is infinite : all else is indefinite, except
woman, who alone is finite, and in her God and
all things find their repose. She is Regina Cceli,
as well as Reghia Mundi.
XLI
God usually answers our prayers according
rather to the measure of His own magnificence
than to that of our asking ; so that we often do
not know His boons to be those for which we
besought Him.
AUREA DICTA 15
XLII
Men would never offend God, if they knew
how ready He is to forgive them.
XLIII
The sweetness even of self-denial wears with
time, and becomes tediously easy.
XLIV
"To do good and truth for t/ie sake of good and
truth is to lo\e the Lord above all things and
ones neighbour as oneself."
XLV
Divine favours are forced upon the Soul in
proportion to her detachment from them.
XLVI
It is one thing to be blind, and another to be
in darkness.
i6 AUREA DICTA
XLVII
Pardon is not over and done willi once for all,
Init incessant contrition and incessant pardon are
the compensating dainties of those in heaven who
have lost the dainties of first innocence.
XLVIII
In times of darkness and temptation the influx
of blessing from God is not stopped but only
checked in its course, as by a dam, and the
longer the temptation the greater the flood of
good that pours in from Him who then " Turns
our captivity as the Rivers in the South."
XLIX
"To him that waits all things reveal them-
selves," provided that he has the courage not to
deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the
light.
When first you unite yourself by charity to the
whole human race, then shall you indeed perceive
that Christ died for you.
AUREA DICTA 17
LI
Delight is pleasanter than pleasure ; peace
more delightful than delight. " Seek peace and
ensue it."
LII
Creation differs from subsistence only as the
first leap of a fountain differs from its con-
tinuance.
LlII
When once the ponderous wheel of the will is
set in motion towards God, the same pressure,
steadily applied, will increase its speed in-
definitely.
LIV
The modern Agnostic improves upon the
ancient by adding "I don't care" to "I don't
know."
C
I
1 8 AUREA DICTA
LV
A moment's fruition of a true felicity is enough
and eternity not too much.
LVI
You shall never recover in heaven the least
good which you have profaned and forfeited by
seeking it consciously against order. You may,
by great repentance, get something better, but
never that.
LVII
The wilful brook of man's nature desires to go
by rule, and chafes at all that checks its straight
course ; the sea of grace fills by turns every
changing dimple in the sand, meeting unecjual
claims with equal duty.
AUREA DICTA 19
LVIII
All the love and joy that a man has ever
received in perception is laid up in him as the
sunshine of a hundred years is laid up in the bole
of the oak.
LIX
" Let each man," says St. Paul, " abound in his
own sense." When once he has got into the
region of perception let him take care that his
vision is his own, and not fancy he can profit him-
self or others much by trying to appropriate their
peculiar variations of the common theme.
LX
The Angels, it is said, fell, because they would
not obey the command that, at the name of Jesus
every knee in Heaven and Earth should bow.
They were too pure 1 And it is by the Devil's
purity that many angelic spirits are prevented
from attaining Heaven.
20 AUREA DICTA
LXI
The only evidence to which the Church appeals
is self-evidence. To the sane and simple mind
all serviceable truth is self-evident, on being
simply asserted. The Gospel of Christ is merely
"good news."
LXII
The ardour chills us which we do not share.
LXI 1 1
The more wild and incredible your desire the
more willing and prompt God is in fulfilling it, if
you will have it so.
LXIV
The religion of most persons who are sincerely
religious is in a state of fire- mist, which a due
meditation on the Incarnation would condense
into New Heavens and a New Earth.
AUREA DICTA 21
LXV
Your dunghill fowl is not in the least embar-
rassed if he finds a diamond on his feeding-ground.
He knows its exact value for Jiitii, and kicks it out
of his way with a crow of exultation at the clear-
ness of his own discernment.
LXV I
Would you possess what is, and shun what seems?
Believe and cling to nothing but your dreams.
LXV II
There are some sorts of love which are per-
mitted only to God. He alone, for instance,
may love and worship images graven by His own
hands.
22 AUREA DICTA
LXVIII
It is easy to love when we feel that we are
worthy of love, impossible otherwise. A perfect
intention, failing only through ignorance, is alone
worthiness.
LXIX
That which you confess to - day, you shall
perceive to-morrow.
LXX
" In the mouth of two witnesses shall all things
be established." One witness is human instinct
inspired by God ; the other is the sanction and
corroboration of the Church.
AUREA DICTA 23
LXXI
IVomaji, according to the Sab'e Regiwi, is " Our
Life, our Sweetness, and our Hope." God is so
only in so far as He is "made flesh," i.e. Woman.
" The Flesh of God is the Head of Man," says
St. Augustine. Thus the Last is indeed the First.
"The lifting of her eyelash is my Lord."
LXXII
The obligatory dogmata of the Church are only
the seeds of life. The splendid flowers and the
delicious fruits are all in the corollaries, which few,
besides the Saints, pay any attention to. Heaven
becomes very intelligible and attractive when it is
discerned to be — Woman.
LXXIII
-A
Great contemplatives are infallible, so long as
they only affirm. When they begin to prove, any
fool can confute them. -^
24 AURKA DICTA
LXXIV
A thing harder, to those who love, than actual
sacrifice is to submit to the greatness of God's
beneficence towards us. His promises so far
exceed our power of desiring, that we cling to
limitations, not discerning that, whatever form the
unknown felicity of His Chosen may take, and
howe\ei- far beyond our present capacity it ma)-
be, it must include all the felicity and fidelity of
limitation to which we now cleave.
LXXV
It becomes a fact of cxperiefice to those who
truly live, that not only must we give up all
in order to obtain all, but that we must do so
before we attain to any assurance that such will
be our reward. Where, otherwise, would be the
sacrifice ?
AUREA DICTA 25
LXXVI
Many a Lover must have said to himself, " There
are sufferings far worse than hanging for a few
hours upon a Cross. What is that, beside the fact
that one's destined Bride is in another's bed ? "
But has not Christ suffered this ? Lies not the
Soul, the Miranda of His desires, contented in the
bed of Caliban, so long as she prefers the world
to Him ?
LXXVII
" O Anima naturaliter Christiana I " exclaimed
Tertullian.
LXXVI H
"Enthusiasm" is a foul mockery of pure zeal.
True goods are peacefully desired, sought without
eagerness, possessed without elation, and post-
poned without regret.
26 AUREA DICTA
LXXIX
" They are under the auspices of the Lord and
led by His good pleasure witli wliom He dwells
in ultimates."
LXXX
Some saint has written : " Love not only levels
but subjects ; and the Soul that is truly the Bride
of God cannot ask anything without getting it,
though it should be to her own injury."
LXXXI
They who ask for no sign shall have many.
LXXXI I
" See that thou tell no man." When our Lord
gives vision to the Soul, He always speaks this
command to the conscience.
AUREA DICTA 27
LXXXIII
All the world is secretly maddened by the
mystery of love, and continually seeks its solution
everywhere but where it is to be found.
LXXXIV
Direct teaching cannot go much beyond point-
ing out the conditions of perception, and the
direction in which it is to be looked for.
LXXXV
Consider what is the most marked characteristic
of the popular literature and art of the present
time, and think whether it is not exactly to be
described as "the abomination of desolation in
the holy places^
LXXXV I
"The human form divine." It is aclually
divine ; for the Body is the house of God, and
an image of Him, though the Devil may be its
present tenant.
28 AUREA DICTA
LXXXVII
" Each particular perception gives rise to a
perceptive state, the permanence of which is
memory." — Aiisfotlc. So that the man's hfe is
the sum of his perceptions, and of his inferences
from them, which are themselves perceptions.
LXXXVIII
Belief in the Incarnation is immortality, for
it really subsists only with those in whom the
Incarnation already is. " None can say that
Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost."
LXXXIX
" Under the Tree where thy mother was de-
bauched, I have redeemed thee." "We are healed
by the serpent by which we were slain." It is
by the natural desires that we were slain, and
it is by the natural desires, made truly natural
by inoculation with the Body of Christ, that we
are ultimately saved. Religion has no real power
until it becomes 7iatuniL
AUREA DICTA 29
XC
Goethe said that " God is manifested in ulti-
mates " ; that is, in facts of human nature of which
we not only see no explanation, but also see that
no explanation is possible.
XCI
Adam's naming of the animals in Paradise was
his vision of the nature, distinction, and purpose
of each of his own instincts and powers : for he
was paradise.
XCII
The bliss of heaven, which many have attained
here, is the synthesis of absolute content and
infinite desire.
30 AUREA DICTA
XCIII
" We are saved by hope " ; but how shall
we hope without some knowledge of what to
hope for ?
XCIV
The most pregnant passages of Scripture, of
the wise ancients, and of great poets are those
which seem to you to ha\e no meaning, or an
absurd one.
xcv
A dark, conspicuous, and insoluble enigma is
the source of all love, and of the celestial decorum
of the universe.
XCVI
What a Lover sees in the Beloved is the pro-
jected shadow of his own potential beauty in the
eyes of God. The shadow is given to those who
cannot see themselves in order that they may
learn to believe the word : " Rex concupiscet
decorem tuum."
AUREA DICTA 31
XCVII
" Detachment " consists, not in casting aside
all natural loves and goods, but in the possession
of a love and a good so great that all others,
though they may and do acquire increase through
the presence of the greater love and good, which
explains and justifies them, seem nothing in com-
parison.
XCVII I
An hypothesis may be of the greatest help to
the mind as showing that a thing is explicable,
though the explanation may not be the true one.
XCIX
" One fool will deny more truth in half an hour
than a wise man can prove in se\'en j'ears "
God's Law is the " ten-stringed harp " of David,
and all the music of life resides in the various and
measured vibration with which it responds to the
touch of the passions. Sin snaps the strings in
its ignorant and brutal preference of noise to
music.
32 AUREA DICTA
CI
Nations die of softening of the brain, which, for
a long time, passes for softening of the heart.
CII
" Rationahsm " begins at the wrong end-
Rehgion rationahses from the primary and sub-
stantial Reason, and explains all things. Ration-
alists take zero for their datum, and, do what they
may, they can make nothing of it.
cm
'•'•Noli me tangere" is the only favour which the
Saint asks from the world.
CIV
The Holy Spirit so speaks with the divine
tongue in each prophet that each man hears Him
speak in his own tongue.
AUREA DICTA 33
CV
No degree of purity is possible to him who
does not endea\our to obey the command, " Be
ye pure as I am pure."
CVI
All men are led to Heaven by their o\\'n loves ;
but these must first be sacrificed.
CVII
The Poet alone has the power of so saying
the truth "which it is not lawful to utter," that
the disc with its withering heat and blinding
brilliance remains wholly invisible, while enough
warmth and light are allowed to pass through
the clouds of his speech to diffuse daylight and
genial warmth.
D
I
34 AUREA DICTA
CVIII
"The Ark of the Covenant was," says Aqiunas,
"a symbol of mysteries of the faith which must
not be unveiled but to those who arc advanced
in holiness."
CIX
Heaven is too much like Earth to be spoken of,
as it really is, lest the generality should think it
like their Earth, which is Hell.
CX
The great secrets of life lie too far within, not
too far beyond, our mental focus to be seen.
Philosophy consists in limiting the focus, not
in extending it.
CXI
Nothing can corroborate an ascertained material
fact ; but spiritual facts are capable of infinite
corroboration. The fact of love, for example, is
capable of infinite corroboration. This explains
the talk and bcha\'iour of lovers.
AUREA DICTA 35
CXI I
It is only by fidelity to truth, which is beyond
perception, that perception can be attained and
sustained. " Do my commandments and ye shall
know of the doctrine."
CXI 1 1
The scientist asks, with the father of John the
Baptist, " How shall I know these things ? " and
the answer is, " You shall be blind till they come
about."
CXIV
" I tell you these things, not because you know
them not, but because ye know them." All living
instruction is nothing but corroboration of intuitive
knowledge.
cxv
"Everything which is not of faith is sin."
Nature, without faith, whereby the internal realities
of Nature are acknowledged and discerned, is a
nut of which the kernel is dust and corruption.
36 AUREA DICTA
CXVI
" Cod is infinitely credible," says St. Augustine,
that is, He is also infinitely incredible. Modern
thought only recognises the latter half of the pro-
position. But man is sane in proportion as he
can say, with David, "Thy testimonies, O God,
are become exceedingly credible."
CXVI I
The power of believing and acting upon self-
evidence is true strength of intellect and character.
CXVIII
The account of the Creation, in Genesis, is
prophecy, not history. We are now in the begin-
ning of the Sixth Day. Woman is being created
out of man.
CXIX
Not only are all things known by their relatives
and contraries, but the capacity for the one is
created by the other. Extremity of evil creates
the capacity for extremity of good, and the
existence of evil is thus justified : temporary evil
creates capacity for eternal good.
AUREA DICTA 37
cxx
Contrast, artistic and otherwise, is not between
absolute positive and absolute negative, but
between different degrees of the same positive.
Night would not be a contrast to day, were night
really dark.
CXXI
Popular esotericism — and esotericism is becom-
ing popular — means conscientious wenching, or
worse.
CXXI I
The promises of God are samples of what is
promised ; as a handful of wheat is of the barn.
CXXI II
"All things are made for the supreme good
things, all things tend to that end ; and we may
be said to account for a thing when we show that
it is so best." — Berkeley.
38 AUREA DICTA
CXXIV
" What ouglU to he must be." — S/. Atigustine.
cxxv
Fortunately for themselves and the world, nearly
all men are cowards and dare not act on what
they believe. Nearly all our disasters come of a
few fools having the " courage of their convictions."
CXXVI
Nothing hinders progress in the only true
knowledge, the real knowledge of God and thence
of one's self, so much as the desire to reconcile one
reality of perception with another. We should go
on extending our apprehension of realities, without
regard to seeming contradictions, which will dis-
appear of themselves in time, or, at least, in
eternity.
CXXVI I
How fair a flower is sown
When Knowledge goes, with fearful tread,
To the dark bed
Of the divine Unknown !
AUREA DICTA • 39
CXXVIII
What the world, which truly knows iiothing,
calls "mysticism," is the science oi nlthnatcs^ "in
which," as Goethe says, "God is manifest"; the
science of self-evident Reality, which cannot be
" reasoned about," because it is the object of
pure reason or perception. The Babe sucking
its mother's breast, and the Lover returning, after
twenty years' separation, to his home and food in
the same bosom, are the types and princes of
Mystics.
CXXIX
The most ardent love is rather epigrammatic
than lyrical. The Saints, above all St. Augustine,
abound in epigrams.
cxxx
Not one good prayer has been composed, either
by Catholic or Protestant, since the days of the
Reformation. The additions to the Breviary,
since the Council of Trent, have no I'ay of divine
insight ; and the manuals of devotion compiled
since then, by authority or otherwise, are enough
to drive a sensible Christian crazy by their ex-
travagance and unreality.
40 AUREA DICTA
CXXXI
Union must precede conjunction. Conjunction
is the fruition, or consciousness, of union.
CXXXII
The power of the Soul for good is in proportion
to the strength of its passions. Sanctity is not
the negation of passion but its order. (See Co7i-
fessions of Si. Atigi/sH/w and the Letter of St.
Bernard on the death of his brother.) Hence
great Saints have often been great sinners.
CXXXIII
The woman is the man's " glory," and she
naturally delights in the praises which are assur-
ances that she is fulfilling her function ; and she
gives herself to him who succeeds in convincing
her that she, of all others, is best able to dis-
charge it for ///;//. A \\oman without this kind
of "vanity" is a monster.
AUREA DICTA 41
CXXXIV
"Faith is the substance of things hoped for,
and the evidence (being evident) of things un-
seen."
cxxxv
Love is a recent discovery, and requires a
new law. Easy divorce is the vulgar solution.
The true solution is some undiscovered security
for true marriage.
CXXXVI
The holier and purer the small aristocracy of
the true Church becomes, the more profane and
impure will become the mass of mankind.
CXXXVI I
To call Good Evil is the great sin — the sin of
the Puritan and the Philistine. To call Evil
Good is comparatively venial.
1
42 AUREA DICTA
CXXXVIII
Nature will not bear any absolute and sus-
tained contradiction. She must be converted,
not outraged ; and she can be converted only by
the substitution, for the lesser satisfaction, of a
greater good in the same kind.
CXXXIX
The worthiest occupation of the Wise, in these
days, is to " dig again the wells which the
Philistines have filled."
CXL
" If the Lord tarry wait for Him, and He will
not tarry but will come quickly." The impatience
of the Soul for vision is one of the last faults that
can be cured. Only to those who watch and
wait, with absolute indifference as to the season
of revelation, do all things reveal themselves.
AUREA DICTA 43
CXLI
All particular knowledge, when fully seen,
falls into the one Word — the Word made flesh —
the Name which can be uttered only by the Spirit
to the spirit, and is incapable of being reported in
the parables of the senses, because that Word is
the synthesis of all things, and the Sabbatical
rest of One Spirit in one sense.
CXLII
Those who know God know that it is quite a
mistake to suppose that there are only five senses.
CXLIII
Books are influential in pi-oportion to their
obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of
inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most
obscure book in the world. He must be a great
fool who thinks he understands the plainest
chapter of it. The coming of God is always " in
the clouds of heaven," and an unclouded God
would be wholly invisible and inaudible.
44 AUREA DICTA
CXLIV
The Name of God is " Mundum jnigillo con-
tinens." The name of man is " Deum pugillo
CXLV
O sane madness, which can find, in the sharpest
austerities and troubles a present heaven : O
mad sanity, which, in all the pleasures of earth,
can find no testimony that there is any heaven at
all!
CXLVI
" The soul of the Lover lives in the body of his
Mistress," says Plutarch. "Ye are two in one
flesh," says St. Paul. " My body is already
joined to God," says St. Agnes. " She who loves
God is chaste, she who touches Him is clean, she
who embraces Him is a virgin indeed," says
another great Saint.
CXLV II
The highest and deepest thoughts do not
" voluntary move harmonious numbers," l)ut run
rather to grotesque epigram and doggerel.
AUREA DICTA 45
CXLVIII
Let none of those comparatively few who have
attained to the knowledge of " the secret of the
King," which is nothing less than the supersession
of faith by sight, despise those who are still
walking by faith only ; but let them remember the
word of Jesus : " Because thou hast seen me,
Thomas, thou hast believed : blessed are they
that have not seen, and have believed."
CXLIX
God made man "a little lower than the angels
to crown him with the honour and glory " of
being His own final and Sabbatical felicity. This
would be an incredible condition of happiness for
man, had not God made it clear to him in other
ways that the fruition of heights is in the depths.
CL
You may see the disc of Divinity quite clearly
through the smoked glass of humanity, but no
otherwise.
46 AUREA DICTA
CLl
The Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit are
the three dimensions of God, and the apprehension
of Him has no substance or reahty without them.
CLII
It is the privilege of the simple and pure to
know God when they see Him. All men have
seen God, but nearly all call Him by a very
different name. The light shineth in darkness,
but the darkness comprchendeth it not.
CLIH
Woman desires the infinite, man the finite.
She is the continent of the infinite, making it
conscious and powerful by limitation.
'Tis but in such captivity
The Heavens themselves know what they be.
CLIV
Pride does much and ill, Love does little and
well.
AUREA DICTA 47
CLV
" Taste and see that the Lord is sweet."
Taste or touch discerns substance. " It is," says
Aristotle, "a sort of sight," with this difference
that it is infaUible.
CLVI
The Soul's shame at its own unworthiness of
the embraces of God is the blush upon the rose of
love, which is the deeper the more angelic her
intelligence and consequent discernment of God's
purity.
CLVI I
A Kempis says : " He who has not Ijeen tried
knows nothing." This not only because the
knowledge of truth and good can be made a man's
own only by bringing it into action when under
temptation, but also because " all perception of
good, all happiness and felicity are proportionate
to the experience of their opposites."
48 AUREA DICTA
CLVIII
Sallust, the Platonist, says : " The intention of
all mystic ceremonies is to conjoin us with the
world and with the Gods." Until we are so
conjoined by divine, or substantial, knowledge, we
know as little of the world as we do of the Gods.
CLIX
" The ideas of interior thought in man are
above material things, but still they are terminated
in them, and where they are terminated there they
appear to be." " God is manifest in ultimates."
" My Covenant shall be in your flesh." " The
three heavens " (celestial, spiritual, and natural)
" are one in ultimates," i.e. the first can stand
without the second or third ; the second includes
the first but can stand without the third ; the
third must include the other two.
CLX
The divinely enlightened imagination is the
only means of apprehending God in His relation-
ships to the Soul, and every corroborative analogy
is an actual and eternally ascertained approach to
that fullness of vision which never can be full.
AUREA DICTA 49
CLXI
The " wildest hyperboles " of Love and Poetry
are the simplest and truest expressions of the only
" scientific facts " that are worthy to be called
science. When a Lover says and means that he
has been " made immortal by a kiss," he states
an unexaggerated truth. His immortality, or
his capacity for immortality, /las been increased
and partly initiated by the experience ; for our
eternity is but the sum, simukaneity, explanation,
and transfiguration of all our pure experiences in
time.
E
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
I
In His union and conjunction with Body, God
finds His final perfection and felicity. " It is not
written that He has taken hold of any of the
angels ; but of us He has taken hold." " DeHcise
meas esse cum filiis honunuin." The great
prophecy, " Man shall be compassed by a woman,"
was fulfilled when Jesus Christ made the body,
which He had taken from Mary, actually divine
by the subdual of its last recalcitrance upon the
Cross. The celestial marriage, in which, thence-
forward, every soul that chose could participate, was
then consummated. " Consummatum est," and the
Body became —
Creation's and Creator's crowning good ;
Wall of infinitude ;
Foundation of the sky,
In Heaven forecast
And long'd for from eternity,
Though laid the last.
54 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
II
God clothes Himself actually and literally witli
His whole creation. Herbs take up and assimilate
minerals, beasts assimilate herbs, and God, in
the Incarnation and its proper Sacrament, assimi-
lates us, who, as St. Augustine says, "are God's
beasts."
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 55
III
" Amen, I say unto you there are some of them
that stand here that shall not taste death till they
see the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom."
Again, " I did not say that he should not die,
but that he should not die till I come." To some,
not necessarily, perhaps, the greatest saints, Christ
is actually and perceptibly risen. He has tui'ned
the water of nature into the wine of the Marriage
Feast, though " His time is not yet come," and,
to the Sacrament of the Real Presence, He has
added a Sacrament of the Manifest Presence.
For souls thus favoured, the Church's teaching
and rites are but as a scaffolding" which has ful-
filled its purpose. The Temple is built and
occupied. "Felix quem Veritas per se docet. . . .
Taceant omnes doctores." For these alone can
such words as the following have any intelligible
meaning : —
The Lord for the body, and the body for the Lord.
God manifest in the reality of our flesh.
Bear and glorify God in your bodies.
Shall I take the members of Christ, and make them
the members of a harlot ?
The fullness of the Godhead manifested bodily.
My covenant shall Ijc in your flesh.
56 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
IV
The Church regards some degree of affective,
or sensitive, love as essential to the right receiving
of the Holy Eucharist. It must obviously be so,
for what is the "Communion of the Body" but
the communion of the sensitive Soul ? De Con-
dron says : " We should communicate, not only
for our soul's benefit, but also to satisfy Our Lord's
exceeding longing for us." But we must be able
to believe His " longing for us " in order that we
may be able to reciprocate it. Surely the altar-
rail is not sufficiently guarded against intruders,
who only "eat to their damnation."
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 57
V
There comes a time in the Ufe of every one
who follows the Truth with full sincerity when
God reveals to the sensitive Soul the fact that He
and He alone can satisfy those longings, the
satisfaction of which she has hitherto been tempted
to seek elsewhere. Then follows a series of ex-
periences which constitute the "-sure mercies of
David." The Enemy, who can assault us only
through the flesh, has had his weapon taken out
of his hands. The sensitive nature is, from day
to day, refreshed with a sweetness that makes
the flesh-pots of Egypt insipid ; and the Soul cries
"Cor meum et caro mea exultaverunt in Deum
vivum.''
58 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
VI
Man's sensitive soul is Paradise and the ultimate
felicity of God ; and " To him that overcometh
shall be given to eat of the Tree of Life" (God
Himself) " which is planted in the midst of that
Paradise." " This day," says the Roman Breviary,
on the Feast of the Assumption by our Lord of
the Body of the Blessed Virgin, " the Eden of
the New Adam " (Christ) " receives the garden
of delights in which the Tree of Life was planted."
" DelicitC meas esse cum filiis hominum." (Prov.)
" We are His honey," says St. Augustine.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 59
VII
The shame and confusion of the Bride, which
are the dainties of the Bridegroom, and her own,
inasmuch as they are pleasing to him, are not
wanting in that marriage which includes every
felicity, —
Blushes are for shame
Of such an ineffectual flame
As ill consumes the sacrifice ;
and the highest Ang'el must be overwhelmed with
the confusion and terror of an intimacy altogether
beyond capacity and comprehension.
6o KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
VIII
If we would find in God that full satisfaction of
all our desires which He promises, we must believe
extravagantly, i.e. as the Church and the Saints
do ; and must not be afraid to follow the doctrine
of the Incarnation into all its ;/ci///rrc/ consequences.
Those who fear to call Mary the " Mother of
God" simply do not believe in the Incarnation at
all ; but we must go further, and believe His word
when He rebuked the people for regarding her as
exclusively His Mother, declaring that every soul
who received Him with faith and love was also,
in union with Her, His Mother, the Bride of the
Holy Spirit. We must not be afraid to believe
that this Bride and Mother, with whom we are
identified, is " Regina Coeli," as well as " Regina
Mundi " ; and that this Queen of Heaven and
Earth is simply a pure, natural woman ; and that
one of our own race, and each of us, in union
with her, has been made " a little lower than the
angels," in order to be " crowned with honour and
glory " far beyond the honour and glory of the
highest of His purely spiritual creatures. " It is
not written that He has taken hold (or united
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 6i
HimselO with any of the angels " ; but of the lowest
of His spiritual creatures, who alone is also flesh,
" He has taken hold " ; and the Highest has found
His ultimate and crowning felicity in a marriage
of the flesh as well as the Spirit ; and in this
infinite contrast and intimacy of height with depth
and spirit with flesh He, who is very Love, finds,
just as ordinary human love does, its final rest
and the full fruition of its own life ; and the joy
of angels is in contemplating, and sharing by
perfect sympathy with humanity, that glory which
humanity alone actually possesses. This, the
literal doctrine of the Church and the Scriptures,
sounds preposterous in the ears of nearly all
" Christians " even ; and yet its actual truth has
been realised, even in this life, as something far
more than a credible promise, by those who have
received the message of their Angel with somewhat
of the faith of Mary, and to each of whom it has
been said : " Blessed art thou because thou hast
believed ; for there shall be a performance of the
things which have been promised to thee." Let
Christians leave off thinking of the Incarnation as
a thing past, or a figure of speech, and learn to
know that it consists for them in their becoming
the intimately and humanly beloved of a divine
and yet human Lover : and His local paradise
and heaven of heavens.
62 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
IX
" My heart is enlarged, I see, I wonder, I
abound ; my sons come from afar, and my
daughters rise up at my side." This is the
knowledge, the personal knowledge of God, which
immediately follows the first great and uncom-
promising sacrifice of the Soul to Him. The
heart becomes an ocean of knowledge actually
perceived. All that previously was confessed by
faith is seen far more clearly than external objects
are seen by the natural eye. Sons, that is, cor-
roborative truths, come from afar ; the most
remote facts of past experience and of science are
confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ ; and
daughters, all natural affections and desires, find
suddenly their interpretation, justification, and
satisfaction, and are henceforward as " the polished
corners of the Temple."
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 63
X
When once God " has made known to us the
Incarnation of His Son Jesus Christ by the
message of an Angel," that is to say, when once
it has become, not an article of abstract faith, but
a fact discerned in our own bodies and souls, we
are made sharers of the Church's infallibility ; for
our reasoning is thenceforward from discerned
reality to discerned reality, and not from and to
those poor and always partially fallacious and mis-
leading signs of realities, thoughts which can be
formulated in words. Though he may express
himself erroneously, no man, so taught, can be
otherwise than substantially orthodox, and he is
always willing and glad to submit his expressions
to the sole assessor of verbal truth, whose judg-
ments have never been convicted of inconsist-
ency, even by the most hostile and malevolent
criticism.
64 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XI
" Eternity," says Aquinas, " is the entire, simul-
taneous, and perfect possession of a life without
end." God goes forth from simphcity into all par-
ticulars of reality ; man returns from all his peculiar
and partial apprehensions of reality to God, and his
eternity is " the entire, simuUaneous, and perfect
possession of a life " which is the synthesis of all
the real apprehensions, or perceptions of good,
which he has acquired here. Hence the acquisi-
tion of knowledge is the first business of mortal
life, — not knowledge of " facts," but of realities,
which none can ever begin to know until he knows
that all knowledge but the knowledge of God is
vanity.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 65
XII
" God," writes a Persian Poet, " is at once the
mirror and the mirrored, the Lover and the
Beloved." Every Soul was created to be, if it
chose, a participator of this felicity, i.e. of " the
glory which the Son had with the Father before
the beginning- of the world." This is the sum
total of "mysticism," or true "science"; and
he who has not attained, through denial of
himself, to some sensible knowledge of this felicity,
in reality knows nothing ; for all knowledge,
worthy of the name, is nuptial knowledge. '
66 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XIII
" That \\'hich He shows you in secret proclaim
on the housetops," — not to others, but to yourself.
The most- remote, undefined, and (if you do not fix
them in your consciousness, by reflection, "afifirma-
tion, and corroboration) evanescent thoughts,
arc commonly " secrets " which are, of all others,
the most important and lifc-afTecting.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 67
XIV
" No prophecy is of private interpretation." We
must belie\-e nothing in religion but what has
been declared by the Church, but many things
declared by the Church must be spoken by the
Spirit in the Soul before she can hear them in
the word of the Church. Her orthodoxy, then,
consists in this, that she must try what she hears
in herself by that word, in which all is contained,
either explicitly or implicitly. This is not hard,
for the one deep calls to the other, and the Spirit
knows what the Spirit speaks. Flavour and palate,
perfume and nostrils, are not closer correlatives
than arc revelation and human consciousness.
68 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
CI
XV
Plato's cave of shadows is the most profound
and simple statement of the relation of the natural
to the spiritual life ever made. Men stand with
their backs to the Sun, and they take the shadows
cast by it upon the walls of their cavern for
realities. The shadows, even, of heavenly realities
are so alluring as to pro\oke ardent desires, but
they cannot satisfy us. They mock us with
unattainable good, and our natural and legitimate
passions and instincts, in the absence of their true
and substantial satisfactions, break forth into
frantic disorders. If we want fruition we must
turn our backs on the shadows, and gaze on their
realities in God.
It may be added that, when we have done this,
and are weary of the splendours and felicities of
immediate reality, we may turn again, from time
to time, to the shadows, which, having thus
become intelligible, and being attributed by us to
their true origin, are immeasurably more satisfying
than they were before, and may be delighted in
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 69
without blame. This is the " evening joy," the joy
of contemplating God in His creatures, of which
the theologians write ; and this purified and intel-
ligible joy in the shadow— which has now obtained
a core of substance — is not only the hundredfold
"promise of this life also," Ijut it is, as the
Church teaches, a large part of the joy of the
blest.
70 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XVI
Knowledge purifies. There arc two kinds of
impurity : impurity of will, which is sin ; and
impurity of ignorance, which makes that the
Angels themselves are said to be impure in the
sight of God. For essential purity is order, and
there can be no perfection of order without know-
ledge of what is the right order of things within
us ; and the purest of created beings has still to
pray " Order all things in me strongly and sweetly
from end to end." There are in man many
floating islands of good, like that of Delos, but he
cannot have a perfect conscience concerning them,
and they are not safe ground on which to build
the temple of God, until they are chained to the
bottom of the sea of the senses and perceptions by
ordered knowledge. The impurity of ignorance is
in none so manifest as in the devout ; for they act
on their ignorance, and fill themselves and others
with miserable scruples and hard thoughts of God,
and are as apt to call good evil as other men are
to call evil good.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 71
XVII
" Unless above himself he can erect himself,
how mean a thing is man." He that sets himself
with his whole heart on this task, \v'\\\ find at some
stage or other of the work, that, like Abraham, he
has to offer up his first-born, his dearest possession,
his " ruling love," whatever that may be. He
must actually lift the knife, — not so much to prove
his sincerity to God as to himself ; for no man who
has not thus won assurance of himself can advance
surely. But he will find that he has killed a ram,
and that his first-born is safe, and exalted by this
ofifering to be the father of a great nation ; and he
will understand why God called the place in which
this sacrifice was offered "The land of vision."
72 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XVIII
What discredits the idea of " Revelation " most
with those who doubt or reject it, is the denial
that it is connnunicated to the whole world.
Whereas it is expressly affirmed, in the very first
words of St. John's Gospel, that this "Light lighteth
every one that cometh into the world," only they
have loved darkness better than light. A Witness
to a revelation is a different thing ; and that
religion has the best claims upon us which pro-
fesses, as Christianity does, to be mainly a Witness
of that original and universal light.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 73
XIX
After the main dogmas, which are of faith, the
teaching of theologians is very largely derived from
facts of psychology within the reach of every one
who chooses to pay the cost. For example, one
of the most important of these facts is that there
are four states or aspects of the Soul towards God ;
states or aspects which rapidly and inevitably
succeed each other, and recur almost daily in the
life of every Soul which is doing its full duty. The
theologians call these states by those times of the
day to which they strikingly correspond : Morning,
Noon, Evening, and Night. The Morning is the
mood of glad, free, and hopeful worship, supplica-
tion, and thanksgiving ; the Noon is the perfect
state of contemplation or spiritual fruition ; this
cannot be sustained, say the theologians, even by
the Angels for very long, and it passes into the
" Evening joy," in which the Soul turns, not from
God, but to God in His creatures — to all natural
delights, rendered natural indeed by supernatural
insight. Lastly, Night is that condition of the
74 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
Soul which, in this stage of being, occupies by far
the greatest part of the H\es even of the most holy,
but which will have no existence when the remains
of corruption which cause the darkness shall have
passed away. " The wicked," however, "have no
bonds in their death," and this terrible and daily
recurring trial is as little known to them as that
other after which the " Bride " sighed : " Show
me where Thou pasturest Thy sheep in the noon-
day."
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 75
XX
The " touch " of God is not a figure of speech.
"Touch," says Aquinas, "apphes to spiritual
as well as to material things." The same author-
ity says, " Touch is the sense of alimentation,
taste that of savour." A perfect life ends, as it
begins, in the simplicity of infancy : it knows
nothing of God on whom it feeds otherwise than
by touch and taste. The fullness of intelligence
is the obliteration of intelligence. God is then
our honey, and we, as St. Augustine says, are
His ; and who wants to understand honey or
reciuires the rationale of a kiss ? " The Beatific
Vision," says St. Bernard, "is not seen by the
eyes, but is a substance which is sucked as
through a nipple."
76 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XXI
To the living and affirmative mind, difficulties
and unintelligibilities are as dross, which success-
ively rises to the surface, and dims the splendour
of ascertained and perceived truth, but which is
cast away, time after time, until the molten silver
remains unsullied ; but the negative mind is lead,
and, when all its formations of dross are skimmed
away, nothing remains.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 77
XXII
I once asked a famous theologian why he did
not preach the love and knowledge of God from
his pulpit as he had been discoursing of them for
a couple of hours with me, instead of setting
forth
Doctrine hard
In whicli Truth shows herself as near a lie
As can comport with her divinity.
He answered that, if he were to do so, his whole
congregation would be li\ing in mortal sin before
the end of the week. It is true. The work of
the Church in the world is, not to teach the
mysteries of life, so much as to persuade the soul
to that arduous degree of purity at which God
Himself becomes her teacher. The work of the
Church ends when the knowledge of God begins.
78 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XXIII
When the state which the theologians call
"Perfection" is attained, and life is from good
to truth instead of from truth to good, the con-
nection between truths ceases to be an intellectual
necessity. Not only the " earth," or mass of
related knowledge, but "the multitude of the
isles is thine." Every discerned good is assured
truth and safe land, whether its subaqueous con-
nection with the main continent is demonstrable
or not. " Love and do what you like." "Habitual
grace " knows how to suck the baits off the hooks
of the Devil, and can take up adders without
being bitten.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 79
XXIV
There is a perfectly simple test by which you
may know whether you have attained the region
of divine perception. The particular sayings and
narratives of Scripture, which have seemed, if we
would confess it, the most utter nonsense and
absurdity, or mere figures of speech, will gradually
become centres of ineffable light and self-evident
truths of being ; there will be no more doubt as
to your seeing the right meaning than there is
about the key that fits the lock, or the answer,
when given, to an ingenious enigma ; and these
sayings and narratives, from being habitually
passed over as hopelessly unmeaning or as
"Eastern" hyperboles and fai^ons dc parlej-^ will
carry henceforward the only instructions worth
listening to.
8o KNOWLEDGE AND SCIKNCE
XXV
Bacon and Macaulay both cliargcd Plato with
being occupied by words, not things : as if the
words of Plato were not often things, at once the
topmost flowers and the fruits of that Tree, both of
Life and Knowledge, of which the roots are for
ever hidden in the speechless depths. A man
may read Plato without clearly comprehending
much of what he means. He cannot read him
without becoming, in some degree, a changed man.
But he may read and understand every- line that
Lord Macaulay ever wrote, without any other
profit than that of having extended his acquaint-
ance with historical facts, and having become,
perhaps, a clearer writer and speaker. The same
authorities bring the same charge, namely, that of
being mere players upon words, against Aquinas
and all the Schoolmen ; whereas, to a man who
feels that there can be nothing worthy of interest
in comparison with himself, the Summa of St.
Thomas must be the most real and interesting of
books ; for it contains hundreds and hundreds of
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 8i
perfectly clear, self-evident, and final definitions of
things, for want of being clear about which many
men, and those the best, find their thoughts and
ways beset with scruples and difficulties. Twenty
years before 1 saw my way to the adoption of
any fixed creed, the Summa was to me the most
delightful and profitable of reading ; and 1 think
that I am less than most men given to mistaking
words for things.
S2 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XXVI
Every evil is some good spelt backwards, and
in it the wise know how to read Wisdom.
" Destruction and Death say, we have heard the
fame thereof," and Life says, " Memor ero RaJiab
et Babylonis scientiuin vie " ; and " one extreme,"
says the Philosopher, " is known by another."
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 83
XXVII
The Pagan who simply believed in the mylh of
Jupiter, Alcniena, and Hercules, much more he
who had been initiated into the unspeakable names
of Bacchus and Persephone, knew more of living
Christian doctrine than any " Christian " who re-
fuses to call Mary the " Mother of God." Well
might Wordsworth lament that he was " suckled
in a Creed outworn " (though it was only three
hundred years old), and long that he might
Have sight of Proteus rising from the Sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
84 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XXVIII
" Science " makes a boast of death, and the
dryness of its bones ; but it is working for a day
of which it little dreams, when the Spirit shall
summon these together with a mighty blast, and
shall clothe them with flesh ; and such as loved
death shall stand aghast, receiving, as all men do
in the end, that which they have chosen.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 85
XXIX
A large proportion of the difficulties which
many people find in the way of faith arise from
their identification of the idea of substance with
that of matter, which is only one kind of
substance. They forget that science is certainly
acquainted with at least one kind of substance
which is not matter, and which has none of the
properties of matter, I mean ether. What hinders,
then, that there should be many kinds of substance,
each more subtle than that below it, as ether is
more subtle than matter ; and why not correspond-
ent ranges of being, until you reach the absolute
and underivative substance, God ?
86 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XXX
The modern Catholic looks on, with serenity, at
the advances of physical science, ready to admit
and glad to make use of all its permanent dis-
coveries, and to confess that they may greatly
modify or possibly invalidate, not Revelation, but
some practically unimportant points in the
customary reading of the letter of Revelation.
He is, however, naturally somewhat contemptuous
of, and indignant at, the shameless eftrontery of
physicists in setting forth hypotheses as established
truths, and the equally shameless abandonment of
them, without apology, when they ha\'e fallen, as
most of the most famous and, for the time,
infallible theories have done, before a fuller
knowledge. The modern physicist, as a rule, is
always girding at Christianity as if he had an
obscure conviction that it held the clues to the
mysteries which he is always and vainly endeavour-
ing to fathom. Considering his exclusive devotion
to phenomena, I wonder that the phenomenon of a
Faraday, at once the greatest of modern physicists
and one of the simplest of Christians, has not
exercised his curiosity more than it has done, or
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 87
that such curiosity should not have been also
arrested by the fact that the incomparable galaxy
of scientific men who were the founders and early
members of the Royal Society were all (if I
remember rightly) fervent believers, in a time
when Christianity was as much ridiculed and
hated by choice spirits as it is in our own. It
cannot be said that it was for want of a critical
spirit. Hume and Voltaire do not lose by com-
parison with Professor Huxley and Mr. John
Morley. Nor can it be said that the increase of
knowledge of Nature has been so great as much
to modify the externals of faith. The history of
creation, regarded by some in very early ages as
probably "mythical," has, indeed, been proved to
be certainly so, but the myth includes teaching of
much more significance to us than the supposed
history, and every one should be glad to discover
this additional proof that the aim of the writers
of Scripture was not to satisfy an idle curiosity
about facts which do not concern us. The
doctrine of evolution promises to be of very easy
assimilation by the Church ; and recent considera-
tions on the nature of "matter" and " substance"
have made the doctrine of the " Real Presence "
much more naturally credible than it could have
seemed at the time of the Council of Trent.
88 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XXXI
Exclusive study of material facts seems to lead
to an absolute Jiatrcd of life. " Ecrasez I'infame "
is the cry of modern science. Darwin admitted
that "fact-grinding" had destroyed his imagina-
tion, and made him " nauseate Shakspeare."
Goethe thanked Hea\-en for saving him from the
danger he was once in of being " shut up in the
charnel-house of science." Colei-idge spoke
gratefully of Boehme and some other poor mystics
for helping to keep his heart from being withered
by " facts." Profligacy and science (in its modern
acceptation) bring about the same destruction of
the higher faculties, and by essentially the same
means, i.e. by dwelling continually on surfaces
and ignoring substance.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 89
XXXII
Science, without the idea of God, as the begin-
ning and end of knowledge, is as the empty
and withered slough of the snake, and the man,
however "wise and learned" and " well conducted,"
who has freed himself in thought from the happy
bondage of that idea, is among the most sordid
of slaves, and viler and more miserable than the
most abandoned profligate who is still vexed by a
conscience, or even a superstition. The latter,
though miserable, is still alive ; but the former is
dead, and feels " no bonds in his death."
90
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XXXIII
I have said elsewhere that by far the worthiest
use of natural science is in its provision of similes
and parables, whereby the facts of higher know-
ledge are approximately expressed and their
" infinite credibility " corroborated by lower like-
nesses. After the word which the triple state of
worm, chrysalis, and butterfly supplies for the
triple condition of the soul in its states of " nature,"
"grace," and "glory," there is no such laarabolic
speech as that of the qualities of the common
magnet. Obvious fact, insoluble mystery, exist-
ence owing to contact with a greater power of
the same kind, two opposed forces manifest in
numerically one substance, rejection of its similar
and desire for its likeness, power of propagating
that living and alluring opposition in an otherwise
neutral body and, as it were, " under the ribs of
death," and, in exact proportion to its own force,
positive producing and exalting negative or nega-
tive positive, — what is all this but the echo of
the senseless rock to the very voice of far-off Love,
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 91
and the effect of the kiss of God transmitted
through the hierarchies of heaven and earth to the
hps of the least of beings ? Man {homo) is a
great magnet, half-way between the greatest and
the least. The male is the positive pole, the
female the negative, and their attraction is the
whole force of life, and their conjunction its whole
fire and felicity. And, from man, we may rise
to an almost concrete idea of God, who made
man in His own image, and whom the Church
declares to be " an Act," the Act of primary
Love, the " embrace," as the Church styles it,
of the First and Second Persons, that embrace
being the proceeding Spirit of universal Life.
92 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
XXXIV
I have been charged with being an "authori-
tarian " rather than a " scientist." Let any one
examine himself as to how much of his practical
knowledge is derived from authority, and how
much from " science," and, unless he has reduced
his soul to the dimensions of an insect, he will
have to confess that he is also an authoritarian,
and that what he knows with scientific certainty
is as nothing compared with the practical cer-
tainties, which he has derived from past and
present authority. What can the mass of man-
kind ("mainly fools," as Carlyle says) know, if
they know it not by authority ? Even their
smattering of " scientific certainty " is derived
almost wholly from faith in the reports of
those who are supposed to know more of the
matter than others do. Purity, honour, love,
fidelity, everything that makes a man a man,
are " the flowers of olden sanctities," are parts
of traditional and hereditary faith in the words
and characters of those very few who have been
inspired with original knowledge, or "inspiration,"
and who have consequently spoken with con-
vincing authority and not as the scribes.
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 93
XXXV
People believe and cling to a religion, not
because they have been taught that certain facts,
dogmas, and rites, are true, and ought to be held
and performed, but for what they find by actual
experience they can get by so believing and so
doing. The Greeks believed ardently, because
their Myths and Mysteries were found to be
effectual means of their becoming participators of
a higher life than that of Nature ; and they were
right in killing Socrates for trying to cut off their
soul's ordinary food, without offering any substitute.
I believe Christianity primarily, because it gives
me, in still greater abundance and perfection,
what I want and must have. If Mr. Huxley will
offer me something yet more substantial, I will
accept that ; l:)ut, in the meantime, it is of no use
to set me down to a Barmecide's Feast, which is
not even bran, and to tell me that I do not know-
how I came by my bread and butter. I believe
and am sure that the doctrine of the Incarnation,
as held by the Church, is not only reasonable, but
94 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
certainly true ; but, if I saw the strongest intel-
lectual causes of doubt, I would shut my eyes to
them more closely than a man would to evidences
against his mother's chastity ; for would not a lie,
that is at least present life to me, be better than
truth that, by its own confession, has no im-
mortality in it, and, in the present, is but dust
and ashes ?
KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE 95
XXXVI
A strange age of " Science," in which no one
pays the least attention to the one thing worth
knowing — himself I No supernatural light is
needed to see that " we are fearfully and wonder-
fully made," and to enable us to say, with David,
" Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. I
cannot attain unto it." We cannot, indeed, attain
to the fullness of it, for the wonder is inexhaustible,
and " the Angels themselves seek to look into
these things " ; but it is no reason for despising
riches that they are inexhaustible, or for diligently
gathering sticks and stones only because the gold
and rubies on the ground are more than we can
carr}' away. It was not always so. " Scire
teipsum " was the maxim of all ancient philo-
sophy, and the stupidest little Greek knew moi'e
of Man, and therefore of God, who is " very Man,"
than Bacon, and all our "men of Science," as
such since him, put together. We have had only
one psychologist and human physiologist — at least,
only one who has published his knowledge- — for
96 KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENCE
at least a thousand years, namely, Swcdenborg
(" the man of ten centuries," says Coleridge),
and he, Mr. Huxley may perhaps think it sufficient
to answer, was mad 1 Perhaps some degree of
madness is needed, in modern times, in order so
far to save a man from the deadly contagion of
their sanity, " which imagineth evil as a law," as
to enable him to open his eyes to the self-evident
truths even of natural life.
HOMO
H
HOMO
1
"Woman," says Aquinas, "was created apart,
in order that the distinction of sexes " (in the
homo) " might be the better marked, and in order
that the man and the woman herself" (who is
also a potential /lOJiio, or entire humanity) " might
be induced to attend above all to that which is
their worthiest contemplation," i.e. the reflection
in themselves of the nature of God, whereby, as
the Church says, " He has fruition in Himself."
Hence, in heaven and sometimes even on earth,
the separation ceases ; man and woman having
each become the fully conscious homo., or duality
of sex in one being, and a real image of Him who
said, " Let us make Man in our image." The
external man and woman are each the projected
simulacrwii of the latent half of the other, and
they do but love themselves in thus loving their
opposed likenesses.
loo HOMO
II
The body, concerning which Science confessedly
knows so little — probably because Science has
never recognised the clue to its constitution — seems
to be expressly formed for that cohabitation and
communion of two Persons (whose union is a
third) which Scripture and the Church declare
that it is made for : " The Body for the Lord, and
the Lord for the Body " ; "I in you and you in me."
There are two brains, in which Science has traced
the separate indwelling of the legislative and
executive functions, two systems of nerves, active
and sentient, two sides to the body, obscurely
but decidedly distinguished in their activities, two
souls with two consciences, the rational and
emotional, a heart with a double and contrasted
action, and endless other dualities and reciprocities
which are very far from being explained on the
score of mere adaptation to external use ; and
withal a unity arising from co-operation which
makes the body itself as clear an echo of the
Trinity as the soul is. " Let les make Man in our
likeness." Hence, the Catholic Church, which
alone of all Churches teaches the Incarnation as
HOMO loi
a present reality, attaches the first importance to
the preservation of the sanctity and purity of the
body, as actually the " House of God."
To those who look on things as they really are,
and not as mere passive habit has made them
appear, there is, in this conception, no difficulty
beyond such as Nature, in the production of double-
sexed plants and animals, has not dispelled.
Indeed, it seems to me that the indwelling of two
persons in one flesh but in separate bodies — which
is not a doctrine but a fact for those who have
experienced and observed love — is by far the
greater mystery of the two.
The body, as well as the soul, must remain a
congeries of mysteries so long as its destiny is not
fulfilled ; but, as man interprets woman to herself,
so God interprets man, who truly leads his natural
life only when it becomes supernatural ; as thou-
sands upon thousands have experienced. We are
"fearfully and wonderfully made" ; and when the
truth first flashed upon Jacob : " This is verily
the House of God," well might he add : " Depart
from me, O Lord ; for I am a sinful man." The
highest Angel is not worthy of the honours that
are showered upon the humblest soul.
102 HOMO
III
Nothing is so fatal to that " veal apprehension "
which is the life of truth, as thinking about the
"infinite." Truth must be intelligible to be in-
fluential. Our Lord's sufferings cease to impress
us if we think of them as infinite, and the bliss of
heaven itself requires the idea of limit to make it
attractive. I was much helped, on reading the
other day — 1 think in St. Thomas Aquinas — that
some attain, in this life, to degrees of felicity
beyond the felicity of some who are already in
heaven. Ouj- God is very Man, and we can know
nothing of Him but in so far as He is mirrored in
our own humanity. Hence the Church maintains
that the supreme wisdom is to meditate continually
on the Incarnation, which is limitation.
HOMO 103
IV
The Angels gain credibility and human sym-
pathy from the doctrine of their defect of absolute
purity ; and nothing has made the idea of the
Blessed Virgin so amiable in my sight as the
saying of St. Augustine that the only sin she is
chargeable with is a little vanity in the conscious-
ness of being the Bride and Mother of God. O
felix culpa, without which she would not have been
a woman ! If we must think of the Infinite, the
most profitable way is to think of God as having
made Himself infinitely small, a mere babe sucking
a woman's breast, to suit Himself to the small-
ness of our capacities. Doubtless, the Beggar
Maid, like other little Mistresses of great Lovers,
did not love him for his greatness, but because he
was not too great to kiss her, and to love to hear
her sigh " Darling ! " as little maids do, in such cir-
cumstances, matching thus, by the greatness of
104 HOMO
their innocent audacity, the ungiiessed greatness of
their spouses.
For, ah ! who can express
How full of bonds and shnpleness
Is God ;
How narrow is He,
And how the wide, waste field of possibility
Is only trod
Straight to His homestead in the human heart ;
Whose thoughts but live and move
Round Man ; Who woos his will
To wedlock with His own, and does distil
To that drop's span
The attar of all rose-fields of all love !
HOMO 105
V
Who, except, perhaps, Hegel, has ever noted,
except by way of poetical metaphor, the surprising
fact, simply natural and of general experience, of
the double and reciprocal consciousness of love ;
that marvellous state in which each of two persons
in distinct bodies perceives sensibly all that the
other feels in regard to him or herself, although
their feelings are of the most opposite characters ;
and this so completely, each discerning and enjoy-
ing the distinct desire and felicity of the other,
that you might say that in each was the fullness
of both sexes. To note one such human fact as
this is to exalt life to fuller consciousness, and to
do more for true science than to discover a
thousand new suns.
io6 HOMO
VI
Nothing more clearly proves that love between
man and woman is " a great sacrament " than the
sense of infinite non-desert and infinite poverty of
capacity for its whole felicity, which those who
are most deserving and most capable of its joy,
feel in the presence of its mysteries. From this
sense of incapacity for an infinite honour and
felicity proceeds the tender passion of refusal,
which is the first motion of perfect love, and which
it would be adultery to feel towards more than one.
The lower love, being the sacrament and sub-
stantial shadow of the higher — for in divine
things, shadows are substances — is, no less than
the higher, ineffable and beyond analysis.
HOMO 107
VII
St. Augustine writes that "Jesus Christ is the
Bride as well as the Bridegroom ; for He is the
Body," a saying confirmed by St. Paul's " Never-
theless the man is not without the woman ; but let
God be all in all " ; and by St. John of the Cross,
who says that, at great heights of contemplation,
it is possible to love the Son with the love of the
Father whose love is the love of a Bridegroom
and furthermore by the great myth of Teiresias
who, at the end of his first seven years of trans-
formation, again ascended the mountain heights
of vision, and recovered his first condition. This
wonderful doctrine of such a reduplicated recipro-
city as the natural mind, even when supernaturally
enlightened, can with difficulty receive, is neces-
sarily involved in the truth that Our Lord and the
regenerated Soul are two in one Body. " Such
knowledge," cries David, "is too excellent for
me : I cannot attain unto it."
io8 HOMO
Creation is nothing but a concerted piece, con-
sisting of representative repetitions and variations
of and harmonious commentaries upon the simple
theme, God, who is defined Ijy St. Thomas as an
Act — the Act of love, the "embrace" of the First
and Second Persons, and their unity is the thence
proceeding Spirit of Life, " Creator Spiritus," the
Life and Joy of all things. In this divine contra-
puntal music, plagues, the sack of cities, and hell
itself (according to St. Augustine) are but discords
necessary to emphasise, exalt, and illustrate the
harmony. If Beethoven and Bach are but sense-
less noise to the untrained ears of the boy who
likes to hear Balfe on the street organ ; you,
though you may be capable of Beethoven and Bach,
should hesitate to affirm that the sphere-music is
not music because to your ears it is nothing but
confusion. The first step towards becoming able
to hear it is, to fix your attention, as every listener
to learned music does, upon the t/ieme, which is
God, and "///6' love which is between Himself"
HOMO 109
the love of which all other loves are more or less
remote echoes and refrains. This " dry doctrine "
of the Trinity, or primary Act of Love, is the key-
note of all living knowledge and delight. God
Himself becomes a concrete object and an intel-
ligible joy when contemplated as the eternal felicity
of a Lover with the Beloved, the Anti-type and
very original of the Love which inspires the Poet
and the thrush.
no HOMO
IX
Man, when he is in health and order of soul
and body, is Mount Olympus, and in him, so long
as he confesses that he is nothing in himself, are
sensiblyapparent the powers and majesties, beauties
and beatitudes of all Gods and Goddesses.
HOMO III
X
Woman is the sum and complex of all nature,
and is the visible glory of God. The divine man-
hood, indeed, may be discerned in man through
the cloud of that womanhood of which he is a
participator, inasmuch as he also is the Body,
which, as St. Augustine says, " is the Bride."
The "Word made Flesh" is the word made
Woman, and therefore, as that Word constantly
affirms, we can know or discern the First Person
only through the Second ; and, in the relations
of Man and Woman and of Christ and the Soul,
it is the common womanhood that is the ground
and means of communion of the higher with the
lower. At the same time, the actual woman is also
" Homo," and has a subordinate participation in
the masculine factor (as he has of the feminine),
and it is by this only that she can have communion
with him ; and, if each were not both, neither
could have any comprehension of the other, nor
any power of perceiving in the other that reciprocal
desire the consciousness of which is the felicity
and bond of love. As it is between Man and
112 HOMO
Woman, so is it between Christ and Man, who is
His "Glory," and between (".od and Christ, who
is God's "Glory." The future of the Churcli
depends on its assimilation of this, her all-prevail-
ing, though for the most part obscurely expressed,
doctrine. Servants of God we were, under the
old Dispensation, " Sons now we are of God ;
but what we shall be " is only now beginning to
appear. It is because religion is less venerated
now than ever, and love more, that it has become
permissible to look a little behind the veils which
have hitherto concealed these truths from the
many, though they have always shone clearly to
God's Elect, to whom "Thy Maker is thy Hus-
band " is no hyperbole or figure of speech.
HOMO 113
XI
Lovers are nothing else than Priest and Priestess
to each other of the Divine Manhood and the Divine
Womanhood which are in God ; and as it is not
necessary, in order to be an effectual minister of
the Sacraments that the Priest should be pure and
holy or be qualified otherwise than by a right in-
tention in his act of administration, so the weakest
purpose of mutual love, in married partners, is
enough to make them effectual ministers to each
other of that "great sacrament," which represents
and is in little the union of Christ with the
Church. This is the only thought that can make
their imperfection bearable.
114 HOMO
XII
Man and Woman are as the charcoal poles of
the electric light, lifeless in themselves, Init, in
conjunction, the vehicles of and sharers in the fire
and splendour which burst forth from the embrace
of the original duality of Love, in the double-
tongued flames of I'entecost. They are modes and
means of God's fruition of Himself in Nature, and
the more they confess and discern their own
nullity, the greater will be their share in His
power of felicity.
HOMO 115
XIII
Saint Paul, who held it best that all men should
be as himself, and abstain from the touch of
woman, says also, " Neither is the man without
the woman, but, as woman is of the man, so
man is by the woman," adding, however, " but let
God be all in all." These seemingly contradictory
and inconsequent words can only be understood
by assuming that St. Paul had in view the double
nature of the individual "homo," and its likeness
herein to God. The extei'nal womanhood is a
superfluity and even a hindrance to the Saint.
He sees in her only the projected shadow of one
half of his own personality, and she is an obstacle
to his peace and well-being in the society of the
reality. But this thought need not trouble us,
who are not Saints, in our domestic felicities.
ii6 HOMO
XIV
Things in Nature wliich revolt and terrify the
natural heart may sometimes not impossibly be
images and premonitions of good we dare not
lliink of, in the complex heavens. In the world,
how often is Miranda found in the bed of
Caliban, " loving what she fears to look on,"
when she might ha\e married Ferdinand ; and
Orlando as often weds Audrey instead of Rosalind.
These conjunctions, more horrible to contemplate
than any mere sin or mortal disaster, are consum-
mated without shame, and sometimes persisted in
seemingly without unhappiness or degradation,
Miranda continuing to be Miranda, and Orlando
Orlando, with apparent indifference to, or even with
a perverse preference for, the horror of their situa-
tion. Those alone true pyschologists, the origina-
tors of the ancient myths, had evidently learned
to regard this horror as having some heavenly
significance, when they joined Vulcan to Venus,
Gods to women, and men to Goddesses. And
Christianity, by the mouth of St. Augustine, says :
"Christ is the Bride as well as the Bridegroom."
HOMO 117
If the Divine Femininity can find satisfaction in
becoming, by the Incarnation, one flesh with man,
what marvel that certain Mirandas, representing
particular and singular aspects of Divinity, should
dote on Calibans ?
These particular and singular aspects may be
resolved by the great order of the Communion of
Saints in beatific vision, though their separate
and unsolved representation in mortality, in " licit "
relations between the sexes, is incomparably
frightful. There is no horror like " the wicked-
ness of lawful things " ; and Ferdinand should be
mercifully judged if, in weakness of faith and
finding his Miranda weeping, or still worse,
contented, in the arms of Caliban, he turns, like
Nelson, his blind eye to the Commander's signal.
ii8 HOMO
XV
Spirits at will
Can either sex assume, or both.
Milton.
God is the great, positive Magnet of the
Universe, and whatever, in the Universe, aspires to
approach Him must assume the negative^ the
feminine, or passive and receptive asjiect. He
repels and rejects His own primary aspect. He
says to His own : "Thy Maker is thy Husband."
There are, however, rare heights of contemplation,
in which, as St. John of the Cross says : " Christ
is discerned as the Bride, for He is the Flesh."
HOMO 119
XVI
Where God has given very great faith, He leads
His own by the way of the Cross. St. Theresa,
for example, was in utter spiritual desolation for
fourteen years. But weaker souls, whose faith
would fail under such trials, He leads by indulging
them with premature delights, and, at the appeal
of the woman in them, though He says, "Woman,
my time is not yet come," He turns the water of
the natural senses into the wine of the spiritual,
and fills them with spiritual felicities and consola-
tions which make their path through life more
than easy.
I20 HOMO
XVII
" Prove all things ; hold fast tliat which is good "
is not a rule for all, nor for many. Great tempta-
tions must have been suffered and subdued, and
the body brought into order, the soul must have
lifted the knife to slay its most precious possession,
before she can discern good from evil ; but when
the good of the body, or " Nature," has been finally
denied and rejected, as having, in itself, nothing
good or desirable, then the mind at once acquires
an infallible intuition of good, which thenceforth
takes the place of truth, which is only a school-
master to lead us to the sensible, or naticral
possession of God ; and thenceforward our con-
verted Eve, the body, becomes, not a fatal hind-
rance, but the most happy and effectual "help-
mate" and "glory" of the Spirit.
HOMO 121
XVIII
" I cannot help thinking," said General Gordon,
"that the body has much to do with religion."
Here spoke the man of saintly life, who had
attained to an obscure Catholic apprehension,
without knowing it, of the mystery which is
celebrated in the Feasts of the Assumption and
Corpus Christi. And, in answer to the question,
"Is life worth living?" the cynic replies, "That
depends on the liver." He would probably be
greatly surprised at hearing that his pun, meant
to be wicked, is fully justified by the teaching of
St. Thomas Aquinas, who declares that the life of
contemplation, which is the discernment of God
by the spiritual senses, and which he also declares
to be the only "life worth living," cannot co-exist
with any present sensible trouble.
122 HOMO
XIX
There is one secret, the greatest of all, — a
secret which no previous religion dared, even in
enigma, to allege fully, — which is stated with the
utmost distinctness by Our Lord and the Church ;
though this very distinctness seems to act as a
thick veil, hiding the disc of the revelation as that
of the Sun is hidden by its rays, and causing the
eyes of men to avert themselves habitually from
that one centre of all seeing. I mean the doctrine
of the Incarnation, regarded not as an historical
event which occurred two thousand years ago, but
as an event which is renewed in the body of every
one who is in the way to the fulfilment of his
original destiny.
HOMO 12;
XX
The spiritual body, into which the bodies of
those who love and obey God perfectly are from
time to time transfigured, is a prism. The
invisible ray of the Holy Spirit, entering its candid
substance, becomes divided, and is reflected in a
triple and most distinct glory from its own surfaces ;
and we behold Jesus, the Incarnate Second Person,
and Moses (the Father) and Elias (the Holy
Ghost) talking with Him. But none will or can
" tell the vision to any man, until Christ be risen "
in him ; and then it is not necessary to tell it to
him. This is the "bow in the cloud " of man's
flesh ; the pledge that he shall no more be over-
whelmed by the deluge of the senses, which are
killed for ever by this vision, as the flame of a
tallow candle is killed by the electric light.
124 HOMO
" Nature " is the outcome of the conjunction of
reciprocal and complementary forms and forces.
Perfume is natural to the nostrils, colours to the
eye, the key to the lock, man to woman, God to
man. Religion is not religion until it has become,
not only natural, but so natural that nothing else
seems natural in its presence ; and until the whole
being of man says, "Whom have I in heaven but
Thee, and what on earth in comparison of Thee ? "
and " To whom shall we go if we leave Thee ? "
God has no abiding power over even the lower
forces of Man's nature, so long as they remain
unsatisfied and hostile. He conquers nature only
by reconciling it ; but all goes smoothly and well
when, in the Body of God, " the highest is recon-
ciled to the lowest," and the flesh-pots of Egypt
are become insipid and unnatural to a palate
which has tasted apter and sweeter sweets.
HOMO 125
XXII
To regard God without particular apprehensions
of the imagination, and merely as a Spirit en-
dowed with certain "attributes," " C'est an&ntir
le Christianisme sous pretexte de le purifier," says
Fenelon. On the contrary, the contemplation of
the mysteries of the Incarnation in the analogies
of our own nature is declared by theologians and
saints to be the perfection of wisdom. "Where
the Body of Christ is, there the eagles" (great
and high-soaring thoughts and perceptions) " are
gathered together." " Blessed is he that explains
me," are the words put by the Church into the
mouth of the Blessed Virgin, who is the Body of
God.
126 HOMO
XXI 11
" Hoc est corpus meum ; hie est enim calyx
sanguinis mei, mysterium fidei." "Corpus Domini
custodiat animam tuam in vitam rcternam." It
is not the Spirit, but the Body of God, (jod
received by and beautifying the senses and the
affections, by which we are saved. The Spirit of
God comes and goes ; may be given and for ever
withdrawn ; but the Body and the Blood are the
" sure mercies of David," after having once tasted
which the soul cries, " How lovely are Thy taber-
nacles, O Lord of Hosts ! My heart and my flesh
have rejoiced in the living God." " Great," says
St. Paul, " is the mystery of righteousness," the
righteousness of love ; but not greater than the
sacramental mysteries and initiations of that
simply human love which is the highest order of
nature.
HOMO 127
XXIV
Perfect, easy, and abiding control over the
senses is the fundamental condition of perceptive
knowledge of God, and this control consists, not
in the destruction of the senses and in the denial
of their testimonies, but in the conversion of them
from smoky torches into electric lights. "He who
leaves all for my sake shall receive a hundredfold
ill tJiis life " of the same felicities — which we can
only obtain by abandoning the pursuit of them.
128 HOMO
XXV
The Author of the Anahgy, the most prudent
of theologians, considered tliat the seeds of vast
developments of Christianity might still lurk un-
remarked in the words of Scripture ; and there is
nothing against good sense in supposing that
some such developments may possibly be near
and sudden. The certain corollaries of doctrine
are, in some cases, as 1 have said, of far more
import than the doctrine itself, without these
inferences. Indeed, the infinite power of the
doctrine of the Incarnation lies wholly in its
corollaries. "Where the Body is there the
Eagles" (great and influential thoughts) "are
gathered together." The " Wisdom of the
Ancients," as hidden in their mythologies, is
mainly a meditation of that doctrine — which was
the obscure instinct of all mankind, before Christ
" brought life and immortality to lights
HOMO 129
XXVI
The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge
are the same. God prohibited and still prohibits
to man the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge — the
summuj/i bonum — in order that it might and may
be made the sweeter and truly sweet by delay
and the merit of obedience. Man preferred and
prefers to pluck the fruit before it thus ripened.
The sensitive nature, or Eve, grasps at the ultimate
and sensible good, before it has been made
celestial, as all sensible good is, by self-denial.
And years of sorrow, and such heroic sacrifice as
few will submit to, are the conditions of God's
consent to even the least degree of recovery of
the lost treasure, in this life at least. But there
are some who, even in this life, can say, " Under
the Tree where my Mother was debauched Thou
hast redeemed me."
K
I JO HOMO
XXVII
Spirit craves conjunction with and eternal
captivity to that which is not spirit ; and the
higher the spirit the greater the craving. God
desires depths of humiliation and contrast of which
man has no idea ; so that the stony callousness
and ignorance which we bemoan in ourselves
may not impossibly be an additional cause in
Him of desire for us. "We are God's beasts,"
says St. Augustine. This, like all else that we
can know of God, we know because it is faintly
written in our own hearts. Theology teaches that
all things subsist by junction with God — in man
it becomes, if he will so have it, f(?;/junction.
Who knows but that a fatal junction with the
dead rock may be a necessity of His infinite
Spirituality, and an element of His infinite
felicity ? Human love requires to be grounded
in the sensitive nature, in order to give counter-
poise and reality to its spiritual heights. What
if the love of God demands even a deeper founda-
tion in the /^//spiritual, and in the junction and
reconcilement of " the Highest with the lowest " .''
HOMO 131
There are obscure longings in the natural Man,
glimpses of felicities of an " Unknown Eros,"
which it is perhaps worse than vain to endeavour
to indulge ; a desire for fruits of the Tree of
Knowledge which seem to promise that we " shall
be as Gods " if we partake of them. Maybe, to
such of us as become Gods by participation, these
fruits will be found fruits of the Tree of Life, as
are other fruits, which, in the eating, have only
a " savour of death unto death," until they have
been refused, in obedience to a temporary pro-
hibition, and only tasted in God's season and
with the divine appetite of grace. Meantime it
is permitted, to such as have qualified themselves
for such contemplations, to meditate upon the dim
glimpses we can catch of such things, as they
exist in God, who, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches,
knows matter, as He knows all His Creation,
with love and desire.
132 HOMO
XXVIII
The glowing purities and splendours of the
perfect soul are protected, in their growth, by
the dark slough and scab of her dead impurities.
" Let me see my sins rather than Thy graces,"
was the prayer of a Saint who knew to what
dangers she would be exposed by a premature
sight of her own loveliness. The " veil of Moab "
is, however, sometimes withdrawn for a moment,
lest the fact that she is now become a worthy
object of God's complacency, should be too in-
credible ; and she is allowed to behold herself, as
with actual bodily vision, already more beautiful
than Aphrodite.
HOMO 133
XXIX
" The fullness of the Godhead manifested
bodily."
" God mcDiifcst out of Sion."
" God matiifest in the reality of our flesh."
" The iiianifestation of the Sons of God, to wit,
the redemption of the Body."
God was not " manifest " in Our Lord in the
body of His infirmity. He made Himself " a worm
and no man," that man might be no worm but
a god. "Touch me not, for I am not yet as-
cended." Nor can He touch us, until we have
attained to the redemption and transfiguration of
the senses by participation in His spiritual Body.
Some, as we may clearly infer from Christ's
promises, and the witness of the Saints, do attain
to this "resurrection with Christ," to this "mani-
festation," even now ; but they are not many who
" so behold His presence in righteousness," that
they thus " wake up after His likeness and are
satisfied with it " in this world ; and, if this reward
could be so expressed as to be intelligible and
credible to all, none would ever attain it ; for
134 HOMO
the necessary purification by faith and trial would
be no longer possible were faith thus superseded
by sight ; and love would be universally profaned
iDy a knowledge of and an impatience to realise
the "love of complacency," before its conditions
were fulfilled and its order of sequence estab-
lished.
HOMO 135
XXX
Joshua represents the power of God in the
conquest and conversion of the natural man. All
the "nations" of the Wilderness fell, one by
one, before his sword, but when he came to
Jericho, the last of these nations, in the " extreme
West," he was commanded not to fight, but per-
sistently to surround it with the blasts of his
trumpets, till the walls fell of themselves. This,
being interpreted, means that the flesh or senses,
the last power which is converted to God, does
not fall through fighting ; but, that when all the
other faculties of Man have been brought into
subjection, then the flesh is to be attacked by
an incessant repetition of the blast of the amazing
truth that God demands also the allegiance and
praise of the Body, which, being outside the
field of the " spiritual combat," and incapable of
combating or of being combated by the forces
which have subdued all else in Man, can only
be overcome by the proclamation of an immediate
and greater sensible good, than that which it is
called upon to abandon. Persistent and incessant
affirmation of this truth is the only way of
136 HOMO
rendering it credible to the senses that an
immense increase of their present fehcity, is the
reward of submission to spiritual order. All the
habits and phenomena perhaps of a long life
have helped to render this crowning truth un-
intelligible and incredible, and a corresponding
length of insistence upon it is necessary in order
to remove the obstacles in the way of its accept-
ance.
N.B. — The West in Scripture and all ancient
mythologies symbolised the flesh, as the East
the spirit. Hence " The coming of the Lord is
as the shining light, which shineth from the East
unto the West," conversion beginning in the
Spirit and ending in the flesh. The Blessed
Virgin is called by the Church the " Rose of
Jericho," because she represents the flesh, and
gave our Lord His Body. In the Greek Mythology,
again, the great mystery of Persephone's descent
into Hades was transacted in " the extreme West."
To the learned, scores of instances of this use
of the words East and West will suggest them-
selves.
HOMO 137
XXXI
The fulfilment of God's promises, even in this
life, to those " who so believe that there shall be
a fulfilment of the things which have been pro-
mised," are so beyond hope, and beyond and
unlike all previous imagination of those promises,
that they are more incredible than were the
promises themselves ; and the difficulty of faith
is thenceforward that of believing our own eyes
and senses, and of accepting the self-evident ;
Nature being so illuminated and transfigured and
become so much more natural than she was
before, that she is herself clothed with incredi-
bility.
138 HOMO
XXXII
The glorified body, which some, for instance
St. Theresa, have seen in this Hfe, is the ten-
stringed harp of David, each of its members
constituting a distinct note, corresponding to
one of the ten spheres ; and its tones and com-
binations of tones are
Sweet as stops
Of planetary music heard in trance.
In the brief, virginal vision of natural love this
fact is sufficiently apparent to take away all
excuse for irreverent regard for the Soul's blissful
and immortal companion the Body, and to supply
the most sensible motive for whatever self-denial
may be necessary to the attainment of that vision
in perpetuity.
HOMO 139
XXXIII
" Your bodies are the Temple of God," and
they who go out of their bodies, i.e. their higher
senses and powers of real apprehension, to seek
Him, burn their powder in a dish instead of a
gun-barrel, and the result is much flame but little
force.
I40 HOMO
XXXIV
The foul, puritanical leaven of the Reformation
has infected the whole of Christianity, and it is
now almost impossible to speak with any freedom
and effect on the doctrine of the Incarnation
without shocking the sensibilities of those who,
like the angels who fell, insist on being purer
than (]od, and refusing worship to " the fullness
of the Godhead manifested bodily."
HOMO 141
XXXV
The Soul is the express Image of God, and
the Body of the Soul ; thence it, also, is an Image
of God, and "the human form divine" is no
figure of speech. In the Incarnation the Body,
furthermore, is God, so that St. Augustine dares
to say " the flesh of Christ is the Head of Man."
MAGNA MORALIA
MAGNA MORALIA
I
To live holily and to believe nothing is the way of
that "broad Church" which leadeth to destruction ;
for really so to live is worse than to live in
harmony with its no-belief; since the conjunction
of good in externals with evil in internals is as
destructive a profanation as that of the opposite
kind of conjunction, a real faith and an evil life.
146 MAGxNA MORA LI A
II
In vulgar minds the idea of passion is inseparable
from that of disorder ; in them the advances of
lo\e, or anger, or any other strong energy towards
its end, is like the rush of a savage horde, with
war-whoops, tom-toms, and confused tumult ; and
the great decorum of a passion, which keeps, and
is immensely increased in force by, the discipline
of God's order, looks to them like weakness and
coldness. Hence the passions, which are the
measure of man's capacity for virtues, are regarded
by the pious vulgar as being of the nature of vice ;
and, indeed, in them they are so ; for virtues are
nothing but ordered passions, and vices nothing
but passions in disorder.
MAGNA MORALIA 147
III
Favours and honours, when they l^ecome
exceedingly great, become very manifestly what
they are, and are far less dangerous to humility
than lesser graces. The Beggar Maid was not
nearly so likely to be made proud by her marriage
with King Cophetua as the highest of his Court-
Ladies would have been. Hence the subtlest and
most successful device of the enemy is to persuade
the soul that she cannot ^/ease God, much less excite
His desire for her, and to represent as extravagant
figures of speech His assurances to the contrary,
such as " The King shall greatly desire thy
beauty" (^Conciipiscet Rex decoreni tuuin), " I have
longed for her," etc. True, she knows that none
but a Goddess can be the desire of a God, but she
is taught daily by His withdrawals that the divine
beauty in her which He loves is His own reflection,
and that, without it, she is at l)est but a flower in
the dark.
148 MAGNA MORALIA
IV
" Merit," as the word is used in Scripture and
by the Church, means rather capacity than riglit.
Faith " merits " because, without faith, tliere can
obviously be no capacity. Christ took upon
. Himself the flesh and human nature of the Blessed
Virgin, " through whom we have deserved'''' (or been
made able) " to receive the Author of Life."
Emptiness of self is the supreme merit of the Soul,
because it is the first condition of her capacity for
God. " My Soul shall make her boast in the
Lord : the humble shall hear thereof and be glad."
The Soul's boast and merit, as it were, her vanity,
is the God-seducing charm of her conscious nothing-
ness. She becomes through her
Mere emptiness of self, the female twin
Of Fullness, sucking all God's glory in.
The secret of obtaining and maintaining this
humility, which is capacity, is not to deny the
graces you have received, but to consider and be
thankful for them all. If a sudden splendour
MAGNA MORALIA 149
shines about you in the night, and you see your
Soul "in the Hght of God's countenance," as
beautiful as a Goddess, never forget it, but
remember that you are verily that Goddess for
Him so long as you acknowledge yourself to be of
yourself nothing but dust and ashes and a house
of devils.
ISO MAGNA MORALIA
V
St. Augustine says of Our Lord : "Joseph was not
less the father because he knew not the Mother of
our Lord ; as though concupiscence and not con-
jugal affection constitutes the marriage-bond. . . .
What others desire to fulfil in the flesh, he, in a more
excellent way, fulfilled in the spirit. . . . Let us
reckon, then, through Joseph . . . . The Holy Spirit,
reposing in the justice of them both, gave to both
a Son." Every true Lover has perceived, at least in
a few moments of his life, that the fullest fruition
of love is without the loss of virginity. Lover and
Mistress become sensibly one flesh in the instant
that they confess to one another a full and mutual
complacency of intellect, will, affection, and sense,
with the promise of inviolable faith. That is the
moment of fruition, and all that follows is, as St.
Thomas Aquinas says, "an accidental perfection
of marriage " ; for such consent breeds indefinite
and abiding increase of life between the lovers ;
which life is none the less real and substantial
because it does not manifest itself in a separated
entity.
MAGNA MORALIA 151
VI
If a man's ways and works are good and great,
it is because the man himself is better and greater,
and because he cannot help the light of his unique
personality showing in them. The greatest skill
in composition, the most perfect finish of manners
will never equal in value the least touch of that
true style or distinction which consists in the
manifestation of such a personality. On the other
hand, the traits by which individuality is expressed
are ordinarily so delicate and intangible that,
though it may exist in a high degree in the man
himself, its light cannot appear in his works or
ways, unless these are purged from all coarseness
and eccentricity.
152 MAC;NA MOKALIA
VII
The greatest of contemplalives can only " see
in part and know in part," and he is like a child
who is learning to distinguish upon an instrument
the first notes, which combined, shall make the
harmonies of heaven. These notes, indeed, arc
in themselves
Sweet as stops
Of planetary music heard in trance,
and are far more than enough to satisfy his
present capacity for felicity. He does not attempt
to combine them ; for, if he does, he finds that
he is like a child educing confusion by striking
his ignorant palm, here and there, upon the scale,
instead of touching, with careful finger, its
separate tones ; for some tones, though all are
celestial, jar when joined without intervention of
others, and suggest passing doubts and confusions
of spirit as to their being really heavenly.
MAGNA MORALIA 153
VIII
When God has arduously wrought the six
degrees of the Soul's new creation, and she is
pronounced '■'■very good," He rests from his
labour, and bids her also to i-est in the Sabbath
of contemplation of His love and of His beauty,
as mirrored in herself She "wakes up after His
likeness and is satisfied with it " ; and greater
wonders are wrought in her in one minute of
mutual felicity than would be worked by a day
of martyrdom, or a year of heroic action.
154 MAGNA MORALIA
IX
He wlio renounces goods, house, wife, etc., for
God's sake shall receive a hundredfold in this
life, with life everlasting^. But he who, having
obtained this hundredfold return of all his natural
delights transfigured, renounces this also, and
acknowledges no consolation but his share in the
agony of the Cross, shall shine for ever in heaven
as a sun among the stars. Yet even he cannot
escape his temporal reward, but hyssop itself, in
touching his lips, becomes honey.
Thus irresistiljly by Gods embraced
Is she who boasts her more tliaii mortal chaste.
MAGNA MORALIA 155
X
" What r^Tc^r^ shall I give unto the Lord for
all He has done to me ? I will take the cup of
salvation and call upon His Name." A Lover
does not want presents and ser\iccs from his
Beloved, but only that she should accept His
presents and services.
IS6 MAGNA MOUALIA
XI
In proportion as our obedience, — having been
made perfect in obvious things, — becomes minute
and dehcate, it becomes more meritorious and
greatly rewarded. The difference between a
commonly well-behaved woman and a high-ljred
lady consists in very small things — but what a
difference it is !
MAGNA MORALIA 157
XII
When the Tempter can no longer persuade us
to our destruction by representing unclean things
as clean, he perpetually harasses us, and en-
deavours to delay our progress by representing
clean things as unclean. In the first stage of our
advance we are purified by self-denial, in the
second by denial, almost equally laborious, of the
enemy's false charges.
158 MAGNA MORALIA
XllI
Perception is hindered by nothing so much as
by impatience and anxiety to attain it, and by
trying to recall and dwell upon it when attained.
" If the Lord tarry wait for Him," and then "He
will not tarry, but will come quickly." To them
that wait in quietness, attention, and silence of their
own thought, all things reveal themselves, but
None e'er hears twice the same who hears
Tlie songs of Heaven's unanimous spheres,
and, if you would receive new perception, you
must, as St. John of the Cross says, " Go forth
into regions where nothing is perceived," and seek
always, with David, to sing "a itcw song." These
perceptions are " treasures laid up in heaven."
We need not be anxious about them. "The
heart will not forget the things the eyes have seen."
There was a truly divine epicureanism hidden in
the reply of the Greek philosopher to some one
who wondered how it was that he seemed to
despise the delight of love : " I have tasted that
sweetness once." He that would be worthy of
MAGNA MORALIA I59
the Beatific Vision must fix his thoughts, not on
the beatitude, but on the Vision. "The Vision,"
writes St. Thomas Aquinas, " is a virtue, the beati-
tude an accident" ; and the Psalmist says : "So
let me behold Thy Presence in righteousness that
I may wake up after Thy likeness and be satisfied
with it."
i6o MAGNA MORALLY
'J/\^ ^OmaJ{
XIV
'J'here is nothin;^ outwarclly to distinguish a
"Saint" from common persons. A Bishop or an
eminent Dissenter will, as a rule, be remarkable
for his decorum or his obstreperous indecorum,
and for some little insignia of piety, such as the
display of a mild desire to promote the good of
your soul, or an abstinence from wine and tobacco,
jesting, and small-talk ; but the Saint has no
"fads," and you may live in the same house with
him, and never find out that he is not a sinner
like yourself, unless you rely on negative proofs,
or obtrude lax ideas upon him, and so provoke
him to silence. He may impress you, indeed,
by his harmlessness and imperturbable good
temper, and probably by some lack of appreciation
of modern humour, and ignorance of some things
which men are expected to know, and by never
seeming to have much use for his time when it
can be of any service to you ; but, on the whole,
he will give you an agreeable impression of
general inferiority to yourself. You must not,
MAGNA MORALIA i6i
however, presume upon this inferiority so far as
to offer him any affront ; for he will be sure to
answer you with some quiet and unexpected
remark, showing a presence of mind, — arising,
I suppose, from the presence of God, — which will
make you feel that you have struck rock and only
shaken your own shoulder. If you compel him
to speak about religion, he will probably surprise
and scandalise you by the childishness and
narrowness of his thoughts. He will most likely
dwell with reiteration on commonplaces with
which you were perfectly well acquainted before
you were twelve years old ; but you must make
allowance for him, and remember that the know-
ledge which is to you a superficies is to him a
solid. If you talk to him on such matters, he
will kindly approve your pious expressions, and
you will conclude that you had better drop the
subject, for you will not find that he has that
ardent interest in your spiritual affairs which you
thought you had a right to expect, and which you
have perhaps experienced from persons of far
inferior reputation for sanctity. I have known
two or three such persons, and I declare that,
but for the peculiar line of psychological research
to which I am addicted, and hints from others in
some degree akin to these men, I should never
have guessed that they were any wiser or better
M
i62 MAGNA MORALIA
than myself or any other ordinary man of the
world with a prudent regard for the common
proprieties. 1 once asked a person, more learned
than I am in such matters, to tell me what was
the real diftercncc. The reply was that the Saint
does everything that any other decent person
does, only somewhat better and with a totally
different motive.
MAGNA MORALIA 163
XV
The Masters of contemplation teach that its
most perfect form is without exercise of thought
or imagery ; and that it consists in simple and
perceived contact of the substance of the Soul
with that of the Divine. Though this super-
natural state has its analogue in Nature, in which
touch sometimes supersedes all other communion,
it is the last thing that mere Nature can conceive
to be possible, much less attain to ; and it has
been further discredited by a certain appearance
of stupidity which great contemplatives have shown
in worldly matters. Indeed the habit of pure
contemplation, though it is the very highest
exercise of being, really induces a sort of stupidity,
the Soul that practises it changing more and more
from the form and life of the worm, which feeds
and shifts from one leaf to another, and sees the
little way it needs to see, in order to find its
sustenance, to the form and life of the blind and
motionless chrysalid, in which the substance of
the worm becomes at first the pulp and material
and merely potential life of an as yet inarticulate
and unorganised being. When the worm is
1 64 MAGNA MORALIA
wholly thus transformed, the new nonentity — for
God is henceforward its entity — begins, indeed,
to acquire a prophetic soul, dreaming of things to
come. It rather is than has faith ; for it is " the
substance of things hoped for, the being evident
of things unseen " ; and, as the germ of divine life,
which is buried in it, absorbs and organises more
and more of its matter, the dreams become more
and more like possible realities, and the dreaming
soul, which had " no bonds in its death " when
it was a worm, begins to find its amorphous life
and close imprisonment in the foul seat of its
dead impurities more and more terrible, and only
tolerable because it discerns that this conscious
death and imprisonment is the necessary cathartic
and purgative process by which the still remaining
dross of the dead worm is gradually extruded into
the slough which it longs to cast, in order that it
may spread "silver wings and feathers like gold"
in a heaven of sunshine, liberty, perfume, honey,
and love.
MAGNA MORALIA 165
XVI
All men in whom there is wisdom hate work.
To be is better than to do, and in doing being is
lost. St. Bernard sighs over having .to leave the
kisses of Truth, imparted only in leisure, for any
other service of God, even that of preparing his
novices for the like felicity ; Lacordaire complains
that, no sooner had he attained to the love of God,
than all active service of God became hard and
bitter to him ; St. Francis of Sales declares that
the Soul which is pure dishonours herself by doing,
and thereby deprives God of that which alone He
desires of her, her company and her person in
contemplation. Of all work, thinking is most
adverse to that tender and reverent listening at
the feet of Wisdom, which is the true and accept-
able idleness. But let not the idleness of the
Spouse of God make slaves presume that they
need not work.
i66 MAGNA MOKALIA
XVII
Some one has said, " Great is his happiness and
safety who has beaten all his enemies, but far
greater his to whom they have become friends
and allies." Happy he who has conquered his
passions, but far happier he whose servants and
friends they have become. The reconciled passions
are the '■'■sure mercies of David."
MAGNA MORALIA 167
XVIII
Peter made those humble protestations of love
and separation for his three denials, and Our Lord
did not say : " You have denied me thrice and are
not worthy to feed my sheep," but "Feed my
sheep." For Peter loved much, having been
pardoned much. Love is the Prophets' secret ;
and those who have best fed God's sheep are
those who, like David, Paul, and Peter, have loved
much through much pardon.
i68 MAGNA MORALIA
XIX
" There is no such malodorous corruption as
that of rotten lihes " ; no such Atheism and sin
without hope of pardon as the Holy of Holies seen
and known by the very senses, and yet denied and
blasphemed ; no gloomier foreshadowing of fate
than the frantic misery of those who, having beheld
the supreme flower of Love, long for ever for its
profaned felicities, even while they are trampling
it into dung, and mocking with idiot laughter its
divinity.
MAGNA MORALIA 169
XX
The occasional exaltation of the faculty of
intellectual perception to heights far above the
present ability of the moral nature to follow is a
fact of every man's experience. In the mass of
mankind these states of perceptive exaltation are
extremely rare. The visits of the Angels to them
are few and far between ; but they are always
frequent and bright enough to fix themselves for
ever in the memory, and to take away all excuse
on the plea of ignorance, for not striving for true
life ; and their more frequent occurrence would
constitute an immense peril, as we see in the
examples of many of those persons who are called
" men of genius." These enjoy more or less
habitually some measure of the vision which is
accorded to the rest of mankind only in far-
separated moments. As a rule, " men of genius "
are the worse and not the better for this strange
prerogative. They not only mentally assent to
Truth in doing falsely — which is a sin easily
pardonable on repentance — but they join evil with
a present and perceptive knowledge of good,
which is the sin against the Holy Ghost ; nay,
I70 MAGNA MORALIA
they often feed the swine of their lusts with the
pearls of their perception ; they look on the bared
splendours of Purity with eyes of the untransfigured
passions ; and their reward is to be devoured by
these as by dogs, instead of obtaining the felicity
of Endymion. God " rains flesh " (good sensi-
tively perceived upon them) "as thick as dust,
and feathered fowls " (real apprehensions) " like
as the sand of the sea," but while the manna and
fat quails are in their mouths, He " sends leanness
into their souls." " Obey, therefore, thy holy
Angel, for God is in him and He will not pardon."
MAGNA MORALIA 171
XXI
Sit, with jMary, at the feet of Christ, listening to
His words, and be not busied with much serving.
His words are real apprehensions, eternal states,
which you make yours by consciousness and
consent. Do not try to reconcile these appre-
hended realities. The prayer of the Prophet to
be enabled to "lie down with Him altogether"
cannot be fulfilled sensibly or intelligibly in this
life, though it is potentially realised when the will
becomes wholly His. Leave the form of the
future wholly to Him ; not in anything insisting
on your natural desires, which, if you attain to life,
will all, indeed, be fulfilled beyond desire, though
perhaps in modes the very reverse of those you
e.Kpect and desire now. You do not truly " love
God and keep His commandments" by insisting,
in desire, upon anything, even the salvation of your
dearest and nearest. If you believe in and love
God, you will effectually believe that He loves all
who are capable of His love far better than you
do, and you will be heartily sure that you \s\\\
give, when you know all, a joyful consent to
decrees which may seem to you now most hard
and terrible.
172 MAGNA MORALIA
XXII
God is the only reality, and we are real only so
far as we are in His order, and He is in us.
Hell, or Hades, was truly regarded by the ancients
as the realm of shades, or phantoms and frightful
dreams. We may know this by considering what
phantoms, terrified by other phantoms, even the
best of us are, in those seasons in which God
withdraws His sensible presence and courage from
our hearts, and we are frightened out of our wits
by shadowy evils which our reason tells us are no
evils ; when some small prospective loss looks like
ruin, some really trifling possible trouble keeps
us awake all night with fear, and some little diffi-
culty, which lifting a hand might remove, seems
insuperable. All evils are phantoms, even physi-
cal pain, which a perfectly courageous heart con-
verts, by simply confronting it, into present and
sensible joy of purgation and victory. " Savages "
will laugh and sing under excruciating tortures, and
many a Saint has been forbidden by his director
to inflict on himself corporeal pain, because it has
become a luxury.
MAGNA MORALIA 17^
XXIII
Who knows but that the greatest Cross hi hfe,
the knowledge that the only Dear One is for
another's arms, may be changed, by fullness of
sympathy, into fullness of fruition. " His Law is
exceeding broad," and let us not limit our eternal
faculties by a temporal denial of their possibilities.
In such case " let our will have no word to say."
Let us be content with His promise that "He will
fulfil all our desires," we know not how.
174 MAGNA MORALIA
XXIV
Ninety-nine men in a hundred are natural men,
that is, beasts of prey ; and it is mere insanity, in
business matters, to deal with a stranger upon any
other assumption than that he is a natural man,
though we should veil our knowledge of the actual
fact by a courteous recognition in words and
manners of his better possibilities. No one
ought to be disappointed or angry at finding a
man to be what good sense was bound to expect
him to be. We should rather wonder and give
great thanks to God whenever we come across
His greatest miracle, a supernatural, or honest
and just man.
MAGNA MORALIA 175
XXV
God is so infatuated with the beauty of the Soul
to which He is united that she cannot move a step,
or speak a word in His presence, without giving
Him a new fehcity. But His presence is in her
consciousness of it, and her grace thence derived.
For what woman's least action, look, or word is
not exalted into grace by her knowledge that the
sight of her is giving her Lover felicity ? This
consciousness is the " easy yoke " and the " light
burden " of which none but the perfect know
anything.
176 MAGNA MO R ALIA
XXVI
The true Temple has veil within veil, and one
is rent for the ingress of God every time the Soul
dies upon the Cross, that is, resists interior
temptations even to despair. " Precious in the
sight of the Lord is the death of His Saints";
and every Soul which is destined for Sanctity dies
many times in this terrible initiative caress of
God.
MAGNA MORALIA 177
XXVII
God is not like Man, that great things should
make Him incapable of small ones. On the
contrary, He has a microscopic perception of the
minutest additions to His "glory," or felicity of
reciprocated Love ,: and to Him the least of these
additions is priceless.
N
178 MAGNA MORALIA
XXVIII
Christ is the " Desire of all Nations." What-
ever good of the intellect, affections, or perceptions
we have ever felt or can imagine is contained in
the fruition of God. It will be as if all the infinite
forms which lie hidden and possible to the sculptor
in a block of marble should exist and be distinctly
discerned at one and the same moment. Hence
it is that, in the process of sanctification, each Soul
is safely led by her own desires, which God gives
her back glorified directly she has made a sincere
sacrifice of them ; and He says, not only " Let
the Heavens rejoice," but, " Philistia be glad
of me."
MAGNA MORALIA 179
XXIX
The baptism of water is initiation into Truth.
It is therefore given to infants, since security is
at the time taken that Truth shall be adequately
presented. The baptism of fire is initiation into
love, through a supernatural gift of perception of
its beatitude.
I So MAGNA MURALIA
XXX
In the earlier half of the Soul's progress,
luunan loves are the interpretation and motives
of the divine ; but, in the second, the divine love
becomes the interpretation and motive of the
human. Example : the Holy Eucharist, in the
beginning, is desired because it resembles the
lower but still "great" sacrament of human
affection ; afterwards the lower sacrament is
explained and glorified by its resemblance to the
higher. The latter, if you will consider it, is
only a mystery ; the former is not only a mystery
but also, when regarded by itself, the greatest of
anomalies.
MAGNA MORALIA i8i
XXXI
Many a man, who is pure and blameless in
his own eyes and in those of the world, is, in
God's sight, as foul as the piebald hair of leprosy ;
and many another, the shame and scandal of
himself and his neighbours, on account of falls
like those of David, is, through his ardour to
cast the scab of his corruption, a man after God's
own heart, which only sees the end.
i82 MAGNA MORALIA
XXXII
The world is not scandalised by anything so
much as by the inconsistencies of believers, which
it attributes to hypocrisy. But a great deal of
"inconsistency" and shortcoming is consistent
with an entire absence of hypocrisy. The world
having to do only with objects of the senses,
discerns and believes a thing fully or not at all,
and acts accordingly ; and expects that Christians
should do the same. But God and the truths
of faith are " infinitely visible and infinitely
credible " ; and discernment and belief vary infinitely
in degree, from the obscure longing which cries,
" O God, if Thou be a God, save my Soul, if I
have a Soul," to that of the Saint who sees God,
as it were, face to face ; and as faith thus varies,
so varies the life which comes of it.
MAGNA MORALIA 183
XXXIII
On one side of a gate in Athens the passenger
was bid, Ijy an inscription, to remember that he
was but a man, and, on the other, that he was
a god. " Scire teipsum ! " Otherwise, though
" I have said, ye are Gods, ye shall all die like
men."
i84 MAGNA MORALIA
XXXIV
In all matters but the very few defined by the
Church, Catholic opinion is liable to great though
slow change, and it shares in or even leads the
advances of civilisation, especially in its increasing
mildness. For instance, an eternity necessarily
intolerable for all persons out of the pale of the
visible Church, is an opinion which is probably
now only taught by the priests of Ireland and by
Irish priests in England ; and that only by way
of alleviating their feelings towards the govern-
ing Country.
MAGNA MORALIA 185
XXXV
He who does the will of God is Christ's
" Mother, Sister, Brother," and all other relations.
Son, Daughter, Bride, and Bridegroom ; for
" Christ " says St.- Augustine, " is also the Bride,
for He is the Body." He could not be the
" satisfaction of all our desires," as He has
promised to be, were it otherwise. Those who
indeed know Him, possess the "wishing rod,"
whereby they have only to desire any good, and
to take the appropriate aspect of thought towards
it, and it is at once obtained. " The great
serpent. Leviathan, King of Egypt " (Prince of
sensible goods), "became King of Israel," — the
Proteus, also called " Cetes, King of Egypt," by
the Greeks and described by Homer as —
Water, fire divine
And every living thing that is ;
the supreme desire, even while they know it not
of all men, no longer takes every form by turn in
order to elude capture, but does so in order to
gratify every longing. He that hath ears let him
hear.
1 86 MAGNA MORALLY
XXXVI
" Happy is he who understands the mystery
of Persephone. Over such an one Hades has no
power." He who has descended, with Christ,
into hell, discerns the riches of the realm of
Pluto for what they are, — not absolute evils, but
perversions and inversions of goods ; " Spirits
in prison," purities cased, like chrysalids, in scales
of corruption, but capable of cleansing and restora-
tion to their original nature ; and, when so
restored, mightily helpful to the Soul, which,
retaining in her highest sanctification, and even
in heaven, her natural character, cannot live her
full life without natural delights.
Good people, who do not know that all evils are
corrupted goods, in their anxiety to avoid evil, are
apt to call the greatest goods, of which the worst
evils are corruption, evil ; and such may have to live
maimed lives even in eternity ; for all denial here
is corresponding privation hereafter. This is our
seed-time, and, in our harvest, we shall reap, in
fruition, only what we have sown in confession.
Simple ignorance, however, may co- exist with
implicit acknowledgment.
MAGNA MORALIA 187
XXXVII
The \'isible Church is Hke the larva of the
caddis -fly, from which the winged truth shall
finally emerge, perfect and beautiful, but which
at present inhabits a house of singular grotesque-
ness. Sticks, straws, stones, and shells in amoi"-
phous agglutination, giving much occasion for
wonder and scandal to the Gentiles, and often
causing anxiety to its inhabitant, who is apt to
confuse these strange externals with its own life,
and to think that attacked when these are
criticised.
Have you ever, when riding, near sunset, or
soon after sunrise, noticed the shadow of yourself
and your horse on the road before you ? Sucli a
ridiculous shadow is the visible Church of the
invisible.
i88 MAC.NA MORALIA
XXXVIII
" My soul hath rejoiced in God my Saviour
because He has regarded the lowHness of His
handmaiden." All joy is in the conjunction of
oppositcs, height with depth, spirit with sense,
honour with humility, above all, the Infinite with
the finite. Hence an appearance of infatuation
in all love. The highest Angel prostrates himself
before a village-maiden. She says, " Behold the
bondmaid of the Lord," to him who asks her to
be His Bride and Mother. God lies swathed and
swaddled in her flesh, " reconciling the highest
with the lowest." Only lovers can think of these
things ; and they can think of nothing else.
MAGNA MORALIA 189
XXXIX
The Soul before the Jiidgiiicni-Seat of Hell.
" Answerest thou nothing ? Hearest thou what
great things they charge against thee : That thou
madly sayest thou art the Spouse of God ; that
He is joined to thee in thy body ; and that thou
bearest offspring in His hkeness ? " But she said
never a word. Her Divinity so hid Himself that,
but for her adamantine faith, she would have taken
part with her accusers against herself.
igo MAGNA MORALIA
XL
None, in this life at least, can taste the same
spiritual sweetness more than once ; and to those
who practise the divine chastity of not seeking or
desiring that it should be otherwise, God gives
new and immortal delights every day.
" Who has ever multiplied his delights ? or who
has ever gained the granting of the most foolish
of his wishes — the prayer for reiteration ? It is a
curious slight to generous Fate that man should,
like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her
answer is a resembling' but new and single gift ;
until the day when she shall make the one
tremendous difference among her gifts — and make
it perhaps in secret — by naming one of them the
ultimate. " — A lice Meyncll.
MAGNA MORALIA 191
XLI
The imagination has a mighty and most real
and necessary function in the Ufe of faith. " We
are saved by hope," but we cannot hope for what
we cannot or do not apprehend. It is written,
"He shall fulfil all your desires," and "your
heart" {i.e. your desire) "shall live for ever."
Every felicity, however dimly divined by the
imagination as to its form, shall be fulfilled beyond
thought and in a form more perfect than we know
how to picture to ourselves, where, for them that
believe, good things are laid up, " beyond all that
they know how to desire or imagine." We ca?inot
desire any good which is not a reality and a
destined part of our eternity if we attain, and our
imaginations of felicity are both samples and
promises. The great praise of a contemplative
life is that it is the seed-time of the celestial harvest.
A true contemplative will receive into his heart
and apprehension in half an hour more of these
inspired initiatory pledges, which are seeds as well
as promises, than another will acquire in a whole
lifetime ; and the harvest will be in proportion to
192 MAGNA MORALIA
the sowing. The more extravagant and audacious
your demands the more pleasing to God will be
your prayer ; for His joy is in giving ; but He
cannot give that for whicli you have not acquired
a cajjacity ; and desire is capacity. Take care,
however, that you do not waste your strength and
craze your brain by striving to acquire desires
which are not human and natural ; for heaven is
but nature and humanity fulfilled, and God speaks
His promises not in the active effort but the
receptive silence of thought and endeavour.
MAGNA MORALIA 193
7
yj^f^C^ Q^Wryv
XLII
Toleration, as it is now widely preached, may
be a very one-sided bargain. It will not do to let
falsehood and moral idiocy say to truth and
honesty, " I will tolerate you, if you will tolerate
me." There are truths which, to many, are in-
capable of proof, yet their denial is not to be
tolerated, as the most tolerant society finds out
when it is compelled to face the practical results
of such denial. There are 7iot "two sides to
every question," nor, indeed, to any. Nor can
you convert men to truth by seeming to meet
them half-way. The most powerful solvent is the
sharpest opposite. You can best move this world
by standing and making it clear that you stand
upon another.
194 MAGNA MORALIA
XLIII
Theologians teach that our ultimate felicity will
consist in the development of a single divine
humanity made up of innumerable unique and
sympathetic individualities or " members," each
one shining with its proper and peculiar lustre,
which shall be as unlike any other lustre as that of
a sapphire is from that of a ruby or an emerald ;
and they further teach that the end of this life is
the awakening and growth of such individualities
through a faithful following of the peculiar good
which is each individual's "ruling love"; since
each has his ruling love, if he knew it, that is,
his peculiar and partial way of discerning and
desiring the absolute good, which no created
being is capable of discerning and desiring
in its fullness and universality. Every man who
is humanly alive — and it must be admitted that
there are a good many to whom such life can only
be attributed by a charitable surmisal — is conscious
that the bond of man with man consists, not
in similarity, but in dissimilarity ; the happiness of
love, in which alone is happiness, residing, as again
MAGNA MORALIA 195
the theologians say, not in union but conjunction,
which can only be between spiritual dissimilars.
That man is created in the capacity for uniqueness
of character is shown by the human face, which is
never at all alike in any two persons, and of which
the peculiarity is nothing but an expression of the
latent inherent difference which it is the proper
work of life to bring into actuality.
196 MAGNA MORALIA
XLIV
Profanation is the conjunction of evil with good
in the will, and if the evil were to be enlightened as
to the felicities promised to those who " seek first
the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness," they
would immediately profane those goods by desiring
them primarily ; and they would incur an eternal
curse, like that of Tantalus, for having looked
with desire on beatitudes which can only be
enjoyed by those who have previously identified
themselves, as it were, with Zeus, by absolute
self-identification with his will.
MAGNA MORALIA 197
XLV
" God leads us by our own desires," after we
have once offered the sacrifice of them with full
sincerity. The "ruling love," the best-beloved
good, which we offer to slay, as Abraham did
Isaac, that very good is given back to us glorified
and made indeed the thing which we desired.
We have, with the "Wise Man," to leave our own
people and our father's house, before we can see
"Jesus with His Mother," but, after that, God
bids us "go back atiot/ier way, info our own
country r
198 MAGNA MORALIA
XLVI
If the central cores of light, beauty, love, reason,
power, and order could, — as perhaps they can, —
be presented in form to the human faculties, man
would discern in them mere blackness, monstrosity,
fatuity, weakness, terror, and chaos. The hide-
ousness of some of the images worshipped by those
among the ancients who best understood the Gods
was not without its meaning.
MAGNA MORALIA 199
XLVII
No created thing can be united with God, but
all things owe their existence to junction with
Him. Man is differentiated absolutely from the
inferior creation by a capacity of consdous
junction with Him which is rcz/junction. " All
creatures,'"' says St. Ignatius, "are for man, and
man for God."
200 MAGNA MORALIA
XLVIII
The " reconcilement of the highest with the
lowest," though an infinite felicity, is an infinite
sacrifice. Hence the mysterious and apparently
unreasonable pathos in the highest and most
perfect satisfactions of love. The Bride is always
" Amoris Victima." The real and innermost
sacrifice of the Cross was the consummation of
the descent of Divinity into the flesh and its
identification therewith ; and the sigh which all
creation heaved in that moment has its echo in
that of mortal love in the like descent. That
sigh is the inmost heart of all music.
MAGNA MORALIA 201
XLIX
The Catholic Church itself has been nearly
killed by the infection of the puritanism of the
Reformation. That human love which is the
precursor and explanation of and initiation into
the divine, that purity of purities which rebukes
the purest by the revelation of their own
unworthiness and incapacity, has been so deeply
branded with the charge of impurity, with the
charge of being itself the impurity which its
celestial candour rebukes in its mortal subjects,
that modern preachers and pietists have studiously
ignored or positively condemned as carnal and
damnable the greatest of all graces and means of
grace. "The song of the Bride and the Bride-
groom" is no more "heard in the streets'' of
Jerusalem ; these builders have refused the stone
which Prophets, Apostles and Saints regarded as
the Head of the corner ; and the doctrine of the
Incarnation has been emasculated and deprived of
its inmost significance and power. But the greatest
darkness comes before the dawn, and the "one
202 MAGNA MORALIA
mortal thing of worth immortal " is about to be
enthroned in Catholic psychology as it never was
before ; for mortal love has retained and cultivated
the sanctification which religion conferred upon it
of old, though religion seems in great part to have
forgotten having conferred it.
THE END
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